hdrew to lofty heights and said cutting things. In more
friendly mood she asked him questions, sometimes questions he could not
answer, and she could not answer them either, and then their thoughts
would hover around together, brooding over a world of unanswerable
things. All her life she had held those imaginary conversations, but
heretofore it had been with her horse, her dog, the trees, a white cloud
against the blue, something somewhere. None of the hundreds of nice
people she knew had ever moved her to imaginary conversations. And so now
it was stimulating--energizing--not to have to diffuse her thought into
the unknown, but to direct it at, and through, the man who mended the
boats and said strange things to Worth up at the tip of the Island.

And he came at a time when she had great need of him. Never before
had there been so many things to start one on imaginary conversations,
conversations which ended usually in a limitless wondering. Since Ann had
come the simplest thought had a way of opening a door into a vast
country.

Too many doors were opening that afternoon. She was making no headway
with the letters she had told herself she would dispose of while Ann and
Captain Prescott were out on the links.

The letter from Harry Prescott's mother was the most imperative. She was
returning from California and sent some inquiries as to the habitability
of her son's house.

Katie was thinking, as she re-read it, that it was a letter with a
background. It expressed one whom dead days loved well. The writer of
the letter seemed to be holding in life all those gentlewomen who had
formed her.

In a short time Mrs. Prescott would be at the Arsenal. That meant a more
difficult game. Did it also mean an impossible one?

Yet Katie would prefer showing her Ann to Mrs. Prescott than to Zelda
Fraser. Zelda, the fashionable young woman, would pounce upon the absence
of certain little tricks and get no glimmer of what Katie vaguely called
the essence. Might not Mrs. Prescott find the reality in the
possibilities? "It comes to this," Katie suddenly saw, "I'm not shamming,
I'm revealing. I'm not vulgarly imitating; I'm restoring. The connoisseur
should be the first to appreciate that."

It turned her off into one of those long paths of wondering, paths which
sometimes seemed to circle the whole of the globe. It was on those paths
she frequently found the man who mended the boats waiting for her.
Sometimes he was irritating,