rable place? She had always supposed it was
_big_ things--queer, abstract, unknowable things like forces and traits
that made life and death. Did _chairs_ count?

As the girl's eyes closed, surrenderingly, Katie was glad that no matter
what she might decide to do about things she had had that hour in the
big, tenderly cushioned wicker chair. It might be a kinder memory to take
with her from life than anything she had known for a long time.

Katherine had grown very still, still both outwardly and inwardly. People
spoke of her enviously as having experienced so much; living in all parts
of the world, knowing people of all nations and kinds. But it seemed all
of that had been mere splashing around on the beach. She was out in the
big waves now.

She looked at the girl; looked with the eyes of one who would understand.

And what she saw was that some one, something, had, as it were, struck a
blow at the center, and the girl, the something that really _was_ her,
had gone to pieces. Everything was scattered. Even her features scarcely
seemed to belong to each other, so how must it not be with those other
things, inner things, oh, things one did not know what to call? Was it
because she could not get things together it seemed to her she must make
them all stop? Was that it? Did people lose the power to hold themselves
in the one that made you _you_?

What could do that? Something that reached the center; not many things
could; something, perhaps, that kept battering at it for a long time, and
just shook it at first, and then--

It was too dreadful to think of it that way. She tried to make
herself stop.

The girl's face was turned to the out-of-doors; to a great tree in
front of the window, a tree in which some robins had built their nests.
Such a tired face! So many tear marks, and so much less reachable than
tear stains.

A beautiful face, too. If all were back which the blow at the center had
struck away, if she had all of her--if lighted--it would be a rarely
beautiful face.

The girl was like a flower; a flower, it seemed to Kate, which had not
been planted in the right place. The gardener had been unwise in his
selection of a place for this flower; perhaps he had not used the right
kind of soil, perhaps he had put it in the full heat of the sun when it
was a flower to have more shade; perhaps too much wind or too much
rain--Katie wondered just what the mistake had been. For the flower would
have been so lovel