han those which would shut her in.

For she had looked into a larger country. Allegiance to the smaller one
could not be whole-hearted.

She wondered if it were true she was getting hard. Something in her did
seem hardening. At any rate, something in her was wanting to fight, fight
for air, fight, no matter who must be hurt in the struggle, for that
bigger country into which she had looked, those greater distances, more
spacious sweeps. Sometimes she had a sense of being in a close room, and
nothing in the world was so dreadful to Katie as a close room, and felt
that she had but to open a door and find herself out where the wind would
blow upon her face. And the door was not bolted. It was hers to open, if
she would. There were no real chains. There were only dead hands, hands
which live hands had power to brush away. And the room was made close by
all those things which they of the dead hands had loved, things which
they had served, things which, for them, had been out in the open, not
making the air unbearable in a close room. And when she wanted to tell
them that she must get out of the room because it was too close for her,
that she could no longer stay with things which shut out the air, it
seemed they could not understand--for they were dead, but they could look
at her with love and trust, those hands, which could have been so easily
brushed away, as bolts on the door of the room holding the things they
had left for her to guard.

And they were proud, and their trusting eyes seemed to say they knew she
would not make all their world sorry for them.

She walked slowly across Pont du Carrousel, watching the people, the
people going their many ways, meeting their many problems, wondering if
many of them had well loved hands, either of life or death, as bolts upon
the doors which held them from more spacious countries, holding them so
securely because they could be so easily brushed away. It was people,
people of the crowds, who saved her from a sense of isolation her own
friends brought: for she was always certain that in the crowds was some
one else who was wondering, longing, perhaps a courageous some one who
was fighting.

Paris itself had fought, was fighting all the time. She loved it anew in
the new sense of its hurts and its hopes. And always it had laughed. She
felt kinship to it in that. Seeming so little caring, yet so deeply
understanding. The laughter-loving city had paid stern price that its
childre