uld a contemptuous attitude toward her own family.

She had contended that he was unjust; that a lack of sympathy with the
ends of the army--basis of it--should not bring him to a prejudiced
attitude toward its people. She maintained that officers of the army were
a higher type than civilians of the same class. He had told her, almost
roughly, that he didn't think she knew anything about it, and she had
replied, heatedly, that she would like to know why she wouldn't know more
about it than he! In the end he said he was sorry to have hurt her when
there was so much else to hurt her, but had not retracted what he had
said, or even admitted the possibility of mistake.

It seemed that one of the worst things about "classes" was that they
inevitably meant misunderstanding. They bred antagonism, and that
prejudice. People didn't know each other.

Considering it now, she wondered, though feeling traitorous to him in the
wondering, if the man who mended the boats might shrink from anything so
distinctly social as calling upon her.

Their meetings theretofore had been on a bigger and a sterner basis; she
had missed a few of the little niceties of consideration, a few of those
perfunctory and yet curiously vital courtesies to which she had all her
life been accustomed as a matter of course from her army men; but it had
been as if they were merely leaving them behind for things larger and
deeper, as if their background was the real world rather than world of
perfunctory things. From him she had a consideration, not perfunctory,
but in the mood of the things they were sharing. That sense of sharing
big things, things real and rude, had swept them out of the world of
artificial things. Now did he perhaps hold back in timidity from that
world of the trivial things?

She put it from her, disliking herself as of the trivial things in
letting it suggest itself at all. Expecting him to be just like the
men she had known would be expecting the sea to behave like that lake
in the park.

That night she put on her most attractive gown, a dress sometimes gray
and sometimes cloudy blues and greens, itself like the sea, and finding
in Katie a more mysterious quality than her openness would usually
suggest. Feeling called upon to make some account to herself for dressing
more than occasion would seem to demand, she told herself that she must
get the poor old thing worn out and get something new.

But it was not a poor old thing, and the l