more sanely.

CHAPTER XXXI

Katie was back home; or, more accurately, she was back at Wayne's
quarters, where they could perhaps remain for a month or two longer.

And craving some simple, natural thing, something that could not make the
heart ache, she went out that afternoon to play golf. The physical Kate,
Katie of the sound body, was delighted to be back playing golf. Every
little cell sang its song of rejoicing--rejoicing in emancipation from
the ill-smelling crowds, return to the open air and the good green earth.

It seemed a saving thing that they could so rejoice.

Katie was reading the little book on man's evolution which the man who
was having much to do with her evolution had--it seemed long ago--sent
her in the package marked "Danger." She had finished the book about women
and was just looking through the one on evolution on the day Caroline
Osborne's car had stopped at her door. That began a swift series of
events leaving small place for reading. But when, that last day they were
together in Chicago, she asked him about something to read, he suggested
a return to that book. There seemed wisdom and kindness in the
suggestion. The story of evolution was to the mind what the game of golf
was to the body. With the life about her pressing in too close there was
something freeing and saving in that glimpse of herself as part of all
the life there had ever been. Because the crowds had seemed the all--were
suffocating her--something in that vastness of vision was as fresh air
after a stifling room. It was not that it did away with the crowds--made
her think they did not matter; they were, after all, the more
vital--imperative--but she had more space in which to see them, was given
a chance to understand them rather than be blindly smothered by them.

For a number of years Katie had known that there was such a thing as
evolution. It had something to do with an important man named Darwin. He
got it up. It was the idea that we came from monkeys. The monkey was not
Katie's favorite animal and she would have been none too pleased with the
idea had it not been that there was something so delicious about solemn
people like her Aunt Elizabeth and proper people like Clara having come
from them. She was willing to stand it herself, just because if she came
from them they did, too. She had assumed all along that she believed in
Darwin and that people who did not believe in him were benighted. But the
chief reas