ast thing Katie really wanted
was to succeed in getting it worn out.

As she dressed she was thinking of Ann's pleasure in clothes. There were
times when it had seemed a not altogether likeable vanity. It was
understandable--lovable--after having been to Centralia, after knowing.
So many things were understandable and lovable after knowing.

She wished she might call across the hall and ask Ann to come in and
fasten her dress. She would like to chat with her about the way she had
done her hair--all those intimate little things they had countless times
talked about so gayly.

She walked over into Ann's room--room in which Ann had taken such pride
and pleasure. Ann had loved the things on the dressing-table, she had
more than once seen her fairly caressing those pretty ivory things. She
wondered if Ann had anything resembling a dressing-table--what she
wore--how she managed.

Those were the little worries about Ann forever haunting her, as they
would a mother who had a child away from home. New vision of the
immensity of life could save her from giving destroying place to that
sense of the woe of the world, but a conception of the wonders of the
centuries could not keep out the gnawing fear that Ann might not be
getting enough to eat.

There was a complexity in her mood of that night--happiness and sadness
so close as at times to be indistinguishable--the whole of it making for
a sense of the depth of life.

But their evening was constrained. Katie blamed the dress for part of it,
vexed with herself for having put it on. She had wanted to be
attractive--not suggest the unattainable.

And that was what something seemed suggesting. He appeared less ill at
ease than morose. Katie herself, after having been so happy in his
coming, was, now that he was there, uncontrollably depressed. They talked
of a variety of things--in the main, the things she had been reading--but
something had happened to that wonderful thing which had grown warm in
their hearts as they walked those last two blocks.

Even the things of which they talked had lost their radiance. What did it
matter whether the universe was wonderful or not if the wonderful thing
in one's own heart was to be denied life?

From the first, it had been as if the things of which they talked were
things sweeping them together, they were in the grip of the power and the
wonder of those things, wrung by the tragedy of them, exalted by the
hope--in it all, by it all, uni