ord to them
for me, and then she turned on me like a tiger and swore and said--No,
she hadn't come to that!

"It was a case of knowing without knowing. I was so green that I didn't
know. And yet after a while I did. As I look back on it I appreciate
things I couldn't appreciate then, thank her for things I didn't know
enough to thank her for at the time.

"She was leaving that day for San Francisco. She gave me ten dollars, and
told me if I had any sense I'd take it and go back to prayer-meeting. She
said I might do worse. But if I didn't have any sense--and she said of
course I wouldn't--I was to be careful of it until I got a job. She told
me how to manage. And I was to read 'ads' in the newspaper. She told me
how to try and get in at the telephone office. She had been there once,
she said, but it 'got on her nerves.'

"She told me things about girls who worked in Chicago--awful things. But
I supposed she was prejudiced. The last things she said to me was--'The
opera! Oh you poor little green kid--I'm afraid I see your finish.'

"But I thought she was queer acting because she led that queer kind
of a life."

Ann had paused. And suddenly she hid her face in her hands, as if it was
more than she could face. Katie was smoothing her hair.

"Katie, as the days went on it was just as hard to believe that the world
of the opera was the same world I was working in--right there in the same
city--as it had been the first night to believe it was the same world as
Centralia. I learned two things. One was that the Something Somewhere was
there. The other that it was not there for me.

"The world was full of things I couldn't understand, but I could
understand--a little better--the woman who wore the white furs.

"Oh Katie, you get so tired--you get so dead--all day long putting
suspenders in a box--or making daisies--or addressing envelopes--or
trying to remember whether it was apple or custard pie--

"And you don't get tired just because your back aches--and your head
aches--and your hands ache--and your feet ache--you get tired--that kind
of tired--because the city doesn't care how tired you get!

"I often wondered why I went on, why any of them went on. I used to think
we must be crazy to be going on."

She was pondering it--somberly wistful. "Though perhaps we're not crazy.
Perhaps it's the--call. Katie, what is it? That call? That thing that
makes us keep on even when our Something Somewhere won't have anything to