rred that elusive foreboding in the not usually
apprehensive soul of Katie Jones.

"I want to tell you about my girl, Katie," her cousin was saying. "I've
got the _only_ girl."

He was off into the story of Helen: Helen, who was a clerk in the forest
service and "put it all over" any girl he had ever known before, who was
worth the whole bunch of girls he had known in the East--girls who had
been brought up like doll-babies and had doll-baby brains. Didn't Katie
agree that a girl who could make her own way distanced the girls who
could do nothing but spend their fathers' money?

In her heart, Katie did; had she been defending Fred to his father, the
Bishop, or to his Bostonian mother, she would have grown eloquent for
Helen. But listening to Fred, it seemed something was being attacked, and
she, unreasonably enough, instead of throwing herself with the aggressor
was in the stormed citadel with her aunt and uncle and the girls with the
doll-baby brains.

And she had been within the citadel that afternoon when Wayne was
attacking the army. She gloried in attacks of her own, but let some one
else begin one and she found herself running for cover--and to defense.
She wondered if that were anything more meaningful than just natural
perversity.

The Bishop had wanted his son for the church; but Fred not taking
amicably to the cloth, he had urged the navy. Fred had settled that by
failing to pass the examinations for Annapolis. Failing purposely, his
father stormily held; a theory supported by the good work he did
subsequently at Yale. There he became interested in forestry, again to
the disapproval of his parents, who looked upon forestry as an upstart
institution, not hallowed by the mellowing traditions of church or navy.
Now they would hold that Helen proved it.

And Helen did prove something. Certain it was that from neither church
nor navy would Fred have seen his Helen in just this way.

Perhaps it was that democracy Wayne had been talking about. Perhaps
this democracy was a thing not contented with any one section of a
man's life. Perhaps once it _had_ him--it had its way with him. Katie
thought of the last thirty days--of paths leading out from other paths.
Once one started--

Fred's father had never started. Bishop Wayneworth was only democratic
when delivering addresses on the signers of the Declaration of
Independence. The democracy of the past was sanctified; the democracy of
the present, pernicious and