bout the man who mended the
boats. She had had to tell him at first that he was helping, but Wayne
had seemed to think it so strange, had appeared so little pleased with
the idea, that she had not seen it as possible to make a clean breast of
it. She told him that she had talked with him about Ann--that was because
he had seen her, knew more about it than she did. And that she had talked
with him again the day Ann left, thinking he might have seen her. That
Wayne had not liked. "You should have sent for me," he said. "Never take
outsiders into your confidence in intimate matters like that."
And what she had not found it possible to try to make clear to him was
that the man who mended the boats seemed to her anything but an outsider.
And if he had not seemed so in those days of early summer, he seemed
infinitely less so now. She talked with him of things of which she could
not talk with anyone else. In those talks it was all the rest of the
people of the world who were the outsiders.
He had been there several times during the summer. Katie knew now that he
did not mean to spend all his life mending boats. He was writing a play;
it was things in relation to that brought him to Chicago. Katie wanted to
know about the play, but when she asked he told her, rather shortly, that
he did not believe she would like it. He qualified it with saying he did
not know that anyone would like it.
When he was there he went about with her as she looked for Ann.
Every day she pursued her search, now in this way, now in that. That
search brought her a vision of the city she would have had in no other
way. It was that vision, revealed, interpreted, by her anxiety for Ann
brought the sleepless nights and the ceaseless imagery and imaginings
which caused her army friends to wish that dear Katie would marry before
she, as they more feelingly than lucidly put it, lost out that way.
She thought sometimes of Ann's moving picture show, showing her the
things of which she had dreamed. All this, things seen in her search, had
become to Katie as a moving picture show. It moved before her awake and
asleep; "called" to her.
She would stand outside the stores as the girls were coming out at night.
Stores, factories, all places where girls worked she watched that way. By
the hundreds, thousands, she saw them filling the city's streets as
through the long summer one hot day after another drew to a close. Often
she would crowd into the street ca
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