Katie, why
do you think it's so funny? Why does it make you want to grin?"

"You know. Else you wouldn't read the grin."

"But I don't know. Nobody else grins at me."

"Oh don't you think we're a good deal of a joke, uncle?"

"Joke? Who?--Why?"

"Us. The solemnity with which we take ourselves and the way the world
lets us do it."

He laughed. Then, as one coming back to his lines: "You have no
reverence."

"No, neither have you. That's why we get on."

He made an unsuccessful attempt at frowning upon her and surveyed her a
little more seriously. "Katie, do you know that the things you say
sometimes puzzle me. They're queer. They burrow. They're so insultingly
knowing, down at the root of their unknowingness. I'll think--'She didn't
know how "pat" that was'--and then as I consider it I'll think--'Yes,
she did, only she didn't know that she knew.' I remember telling your
mother once when you were a little girl that if you were going to sit
through service with your head cocked in that knowing fashion I wished
she'd leave you at home."

Katie laughed and cocked her head at him again, just to show she had not
forgotten. Then she fell serious.

"Uncle, for a long time I only smiled. I seemed to know enough to do
that. Do you think you could bear it with Christian fortitude if I
were to tell you I'm beginning now to try and figure out what I was
smiling at?"

He shook his head. "'Twould spoil it."

He looked at his niece and smiled as he asked: "Katie dear, are you
becoming world weary?" Katie, very smart that night in white gown and
black hat, appealed to him as distinctly humorous in the role of world
weariness.

"No," returned Katie, "not world weary; just weary of not knowing
the world."

Afterward in his room they chatted cheerfully of many things: family
affairs, army and church affairs. Katie strove to keep to them as merely
personal matters.

But there were no merely personal matters any more. All the little things
were paths to the big things. There was no way of keeping herself
detached. Even the seemingly isolated topic of the recent illness of the
Bishop's wife led full upon the picture of other people she had been
seeing that summer who looked ill.

Her uncle was telling of a case he had recently disposed of, a rector of
his diocese who was guilty of an atheistic book. He spoke feelingly of
what he called the shallowness of rationalism, of the dangers of the age,
beautifully of that splendi