she turned to the right. She could turn to the left, but, on the whole,
it would be better to turn to the right--It would all have been quite
simple had it not been for the fullness of the directions.

She took it that the fullness of their directions was in proportion to
the emptiness of their lives.

As she walked slowly along she appreciated what Ann had said of the
town's being walled in by nothingness--the people walled in by
nothingness. Her two blocks on "Main Street" showed her Centralia as a
place of petty righteousness and petty vice. There was nothing so large
and flexible as the real joys of either righteousness or unrighteousness.

Nor was Centralia picturesquely desolate. It had not that quality of
hopelessness which lures to melancholy. New houses were going up. The
last straw was that Centralia was "growing."

And it was on those streets that a lonely little girl with deep brown
eyes and soft brown hair had dreamed of a Something Somewhere.

As she turned in at the residence of the Reverend Saunders Katie was
newly certain that Ann had not come back to Centralia. It seemed the one
disappointment in Ann she was not prepared to bear would be to find that
she had returned to the home of her youth.

Katie had been shown into the parlor. She was sitting in a rocking chair
which "squeaked"--her smartly shod foot resting on a pale blue rose--the
pale blue rose being in the carpet. The carpet also squeaked--or the
papers underneath it did. On the table beside her was a large and ornate
Bible, an equally splendid album, and something called "Stepping
Heavenward."

Oh no--Ann had not come back. She knew that before she asked.

Ann's father was a tall, thin man with small gray eyes. "Thin lips that
shut together tight"--she recalled that. And the kind of beard that is
unalterably associated with self-righteousness.

It was clear he did not know what to make of Katie. She was wearing a
linen suit which had vague suggestions of the world, the flesh, and the
devil. She had selected it that morning with considerable care. Likewise
the shoes! And the angle of the quill in Katie's hat stirred in him the
same suspicion and aggression which his beard stirred in her.

Thus viewing each other across seas of prejudice, separated, as it
were, by all the experiences of the human race, they began to speak of
Ann and of life.

"I am a friend of your daughter's," was Katie's opening.

It startled him, stirring somet