at I had to--gain by it," Katie stammered, at a
loss before so fierce an intensity. "Does--must one always 'gain'
something?"

"If you knew the world," the girl threw out at her, "you'd know well
enough one always expects to gain something! But you don't know the
world--that's plain."

Katie was humbly silent. She had thought she knew the world. She had
lived in the Philippines and Japan and all over Europe and America. She
would have said that the difference between her and this other girl was
in just that thing of her knowing the world--being of it. But there
seemed nothing to say when Ann told her so emphatically that she did not
know the world.

The girl seemed on fire. "No, of course not; you don't know the
world--you don't know life--that's why you don't know what an unheard-of
thing you're doing! What do you know about _me_?" she thrust at her
fiercely. "What do you _think_ about me?"

"I think you have had a hard time," Katie murmured, thinking to herself
that one must have had hard time--

"And what's that to you? Why's that your affair?"

"It's not exactly my affair, to be sure," Katie admitted; "except that we
seem to have been--thrown together, and, as I said, there's something
about you that I've--taken a fancy to."

It drew her, but she beat it back. Resistance made her face the more
stern as she went on: "Do you think I'm going to impose on you--just
because you know so little? Why with all your cleverness, you're just a
baby--when it comes to life! Shall I tell you what life is like?" Her
gaze narrowed and grew hard. "Life is everybody fighting for
something--and knocking down everybody in their way. Life is people who
are strong kicking people who are weak out of their road--then going on
with a laugh--a laugh loud enough to drown the groans. Life is lying and
scheming to get what you want. Life is not caring--giving up--getting
hardened--I know it. I _loathe_ it."

Katie sat there quite still. She was frightened.

"And you! Here in a place like this--what do you know about it? Why
you're nothing but an--outsider!"

An outsider, was she?--and she had thought that Ann--

The girl's passion seemed suddenly to flow into one long, cunning look.
"What are you doing it for?" she asked quietly with a sort of insolently
indifferent suspicion.

"I don't know," Katie replied simply. "At least until a minute ago I
didn't know, and now I wonder if perhaps, without knowing it, I was not
trying to mak