man in love. Katie's heart
hardened against Ann at the possibility. That would not be playing a fair
game. Ann was not in position to let Katie's friends fall in love with
her. Katie had not counted on that.

"Have you any reason," she asked, "to think Ann cares for you?"

He laughed happily. "N--o; only I don't think it displeases her to have
me say nice things to her." And again he laughed.

Then Ann had encouraged him. A girl had no business to encourage a man to
say nice things to her when she knew nothing could come of it.

But Katie's memory there nudged Katie's primness; memory of all the
men who had been encouraged to say nice things to Katie Jones, even
when it was not desirable--or perhaps even possible--that anything
could "come of it."

But of course that was different. Ann was in no position to permit nice
things being said to her.

"Katie," he was asking, "where did you first meet her? How did you come
to know her? Can't you tell me all about it?"

There came a mad impulse to do so. To say: "I first met her right down
there at the edge of the water. She was about to commit suicide. I don't
know why. I think she was one of those 'Don't You Care' girls you admired
in 'Daisey-Maisey.' But I'm not sure of even that. I didn't want her to
kill herself, so I took her in and pretended she was a friend of mine. I
made the whole thing up. I even made up her name. She said her name was
Verna Woods, but I think that's a made-up name, too. I haven't the
glimmering of an idea what her real name is, who her people are, where
she came from, or why she wanted to kill herself."

Then what?

First, bitter reproaches for Katie. She would be painted as having
violated all the canons.

For the first time, watching her friend's face softened by his dreams,
seeing him as his mother's son, she questioned her right to violate them.
She did not know why she had not thought more about it before. It had
seemed such a _joke_ on the people in the enclosure. But it was not going
to be a joke to hurt them. Was that what came of violating the canons?
Was the hurt to one's friends the punishment one got for it?

"You can't cauterize the wounds with the story of the dog's hard life,"
Wayne had said of poor little unpetted--and because unpetted,
unpettable--Pet.

Was Watts the real philosopher when he said "things was as they was"?

She was bewildered. She was in a country where she could not find her
way. She needed a guide.