not seem the precise word for something in Katie's eyes.

"You see, Katie," Clara had resumed, as if her woe gave her the right to
rebuke Katie for the lack of woe, "you've always had everything just the
way you wanted it."

"Just exactly," said Katie, still looking at the _femme de menage._

"Your grandfather left you all that money, and when you want to do a
thing all you have to do is do it. What can you know of the real sorrows
and hardships of life?"

"What indeed?" responded Katie briskly.

"And your heart has never been touched--and I don't believe it ever will
be," Clara continued spitefully--Katie seemed so complacent. "You have no
real feeling. You're just like Wayne."

Katie laughed at that and looked at Clara; then laughed again, and
Clara flushed.

"Speaking of Wayne," said Katie in off-hand fashion, "he's been
made a major."

She watched Clara as she said it. There were things Katie could be rather
brutal about.

"I'm sure that's very nice," said the woman who had divorced Wayne.

"Yes, isn't it? And other things are going swimmingly. One of those
things he used to be always puttering over--you may remember, Clara,
mentioning, from time to time, those things he used to be puttering
around with--has been adopted with a whoop. A great fuss is being made
over it. It looks as though Wayne was confronted with something that
might be called a future."

"I'm sure I'm very glad," said Clara, "that somebody is to have something
that might be called a future. Certainly a woman with barely enough to
live on isn't in much danger of being confronted with one."

Katie made no apology to herself for the pleasure she took in "rubbing it
in." She remembered too many things too vividly.

"It's pretty hard," said Clara, "when one has a--duty to society, and
nothing to go on."

Katie was thinking that society must be a very vigorous thing, persisting
through all the "duties" people had to it.

She smiled now in seeing that the thing which had brought her to Clara
that day was in the nature of a "duty to society" and that in her case,
too, a duty to society and a personal inclination moved happily together.

Katie was there that afternoon to buy Worth.

So she put it to herself in what Clara would have called her
characteristically brutal fashion.

She was sure Worth could be had for a price. She had that price and she
believed the psychological moment was at hand for offering it.

The reason for its b