She found it difficult to adjust herself to the Ann who had luncheon
with her the next day. The basis of their association had shifted and it
had been too unique for it to be a simple matter to appear unconscious
of the shifting.
She had not seen Ann since the day they said the cruel things to each
other. Wayne had thought it best that way, saying that Ann must have no
more emotional excitement. She had acquiesced the more readily as at the
time she was not courting emotional excitement for herself.
And now the Ann sitting across the table from her was not the logical
sequence of things experienced in last summer's search for Ann. She was
not the sum of her thoughts about Ann--visioning through her, not the
expression of the things Ann had opened up. It was hard, indeed, to think
of her as in any sense related to them, at all suggestive of them.
An Ann radiating life rather than sorrowing for it was an Ann she did not
know just what to do with.
And there was something disturbing in that rich glow of happiness. She
did not believe that Ann's something somewhere could be stenography. Yet
her radiance--the deep, warm quality of it--suggested nothing so much as
a something somewhere attained. It seemed to Katie rather remarkable if
the prospect of soon being able to earn her own living could make a
girl's eyes as wonderful as that.
There was no mistaking her delight in seeing Katie and Worth. And a
sense of the old relationship was there--deep and tender sense of it;
but something had gone from it, or been added to it. It was not the
all in all.
Truth was, Ann was more at home with her than she was with Ann.
After luncheon they went up to Katie's room for a little chat. Katie
talked about stenography and soon came to be conscious of that being a
vapid thing to be talking about.
"What pretty furs," she said, in the pause following the collapse of
stenography.
That seemed to mean more. "Yes, aren't they lovely?" responded Ann, with
happy enthusiasm. "They were my Christmas present--from Wayne."
The way Ann said Wayne--in the old days she had never said it at all--led
instantly, though without her knowing by what path, to that strange fear
of hers in finding Ann so free from fear.
Ann was blushing a little: the "Wayne" had slipped out so easily, and so
prettily. "He thought I needed them. It's often so cold here, you know."
"Why certainly one needs furs," said Katie firmly, as if there could be
no question as to _that_.
Katie's great refuge was activity. She got up and began taking some
dresses from her trunk.
Then, just to show herself that she was not afraid, that there was
nothing to be afraid about, she asked lightly: "What in the world brings
Wayne up to New York so much?"
Ann was affectionately stroking her muff. She looked up at Katie shyly,
but with a warm little smile. There was a pause which seemed to hover
over it before she said softly: "Why, Katie, I think perhaps I bring him
up to New York."
Everything in Katie seemed to tighten--close up. She gave her most
cobwebby dress a perilous shake and said in flat voice: "Wayne's very
kind, I'm sure."
Ann did not reply; she was still stroking her muff; that smile which
hovered tenderly over something had not died on her lips. It made her
mouth, her whole face, softly lovely. It did something else. Made it
difficult for Katie to go on pretending with herself.
Though she made a last stand. It was a dreadful state of affairs, she
told herself, if Ann had been so absurd as to fall in love with
Wayne--_Wayne_--just because he had been kind in helping her get a start.
She followed that desperately. "Oh yes, Wayne's really very kind at
heart. And then of course he's always been especially interested in you,
because of me."
Ann looked up at her. The look kept deepening, sank far down beneath
Katie's shallow pretense.
"Well, Katie," Ann began, with the gentle dignity of one whom life has
taken into the fold, "as long as we seem into this, I'd rather go on.
Wayne said I was to do just as I liked about telling you. Just as it
happened to come up. But I think you ought to know he is not interested
in just the way you think." She paused before it, then said softly, with
a tremulous pride: "He cares for me, Katie--and wants to marry me."
"He can't do that! He _can't do that_!"
It came quick and sharp. Quick and sharp as fire answering attack.
She sat down. The sharpness had gone and her voice was shaking as she
said: "You certainly must know, Ann, that he can't do that."
So they faced each other--and the whole of it. It was all opened up now.
"It's very strange to me," Katie added hotly, "that you wouldn't
know that."
It seemed impossible for Ann to speak; the attack had been too quick and
too sharp; evidently, too unexpected.
"I told him so," she finally whispered. "Told and told him so. That you
would feel--this way. That it--couldn't be. He said no. That you
felt--all differently--after last summer. And I thought so, too. Your
letters sounded that way."
Katie covered her eyes for a second. It was too much as if the things she
was feeling differently about were the things she was losing.
"And when you want to be happy," Ann went on, "it's not so hard to
persuade yourself--be persuaded." She stopped with a sob.
"I know that," was wrung wretchedly from Katie.
"And since--since I _have_ been happy--let myself think it could be--it
just hasn't seemed it _could_ be any other way. So I stopped
thinking--hadn't been thinking--took it for granted--"
Again it wrung from Katie the this time unexpressed admission that there
was nothing much easier than coming to look upon one's happiness as the
inevitable.
"And Wayne kept saying," Ann went on, sobs back of her words, "that all
human beings are entitled to work out their lives in their own way. You
believed that, he said. And I--I thought you did, too. Your letters--"
"No," said Katie bitterly, "what I believed was that _I_ was entitled to
work out _my_ life in my own way. Wayne got his life mixed up with mine."
The laugh which followed them was more bitter, more wretched than
the words.
She had persuaded herself the more easily that she was entitled to work
out her life in her own way because she had assumed Wayne would be there
to stand guard over the things left from other days. He was to stay
there, fixed, leaving her free to go.
She could not have explained why it was that the things she had been
thinking did not seem to apply to Wayne.
The thing grew to something monstrous. There whirled through her mind a
frenzied idea as to what they would do about sending Major Barrett a
wedding announcement.
Other things whirled through her mind--as jeers, jibes, they came, a
laugh behind them. A something somewhere was very commendable while it
remained abstract! Having a fine large understanding about Ann had
nothing to do with having Ann for a sister-in-law! "Calls" were less
beautiful when responded to by one's brother! _This_ (and this tore an
ugly wound) was what came of helping people in their quests for
happiness.
It was followed by a frantic longing to be with Mrs. Prescott--in the
shelter of her philosophy, hugging tight those things left by the women
of other days. Frightened, outraged, her impulse was to fly back to those
well worn ways of yesterday.
But that was running away. Ann was there. Ann with the radiance gone;
though, for just that moment, less stricken than defiant. There was
something of the cunning of the desperate thing cornered in the sullen
flash with which she said: "You talked a good deal about wanting me to be
happy. Used to think I had a right to be. When it was Captain Prescott--"
It was unanswerable. The only answer Katie would be prepared to make to
it was that she didn't believe, all things considered, it was a thing she
would have said. But doubtless people lost nice shades of feeling when
they became creatures at bay fighting for life.
And seemingly one would leave nothing unused. "I want you to know,
Katie, that I paid back that money. The missionary money. You made me
feel that it wasn't right. That I--that I ought to pay it back. I earned
the money myself--some work there was for me to do at school. I wanted
to--to buy a white dress with it." Ann was sobbing. "But I didn't. I
sent back the money."
Katie was wildly disposed to laugh. She did not know why, after having
worried about it so much, Ann's having paid back the missionary money
should seem so irrelevant now. But she did not laugh, for Ann was looking
at her as pleadingly, as appealingly, as Worth would have looked after he
had been "bad" and was trying to redeem it by being "good."
With a sob, Ann hid her face against her muff.
Seeing her thus, Katie made cumbersome effort to drag things to less
delicate, less difficult, ground.
"Ann dear," she began, "I--oh I'm _so_ sorry about this. But truly, Ann,
you wouldn't be at all happy with Wayne."
Ann raised her face and looked at her with something that had a dull
semblance to amusement.
"You see," Katie staggered on, "Wayne hasn't a happy temperament. He's
morose. Queer. It wouldn't do at all, Ann, because it would make you both
wretchedly unhappy."
She found Ann's faint smile irritating. "I ought to know," she added
sharply, "for I've lived in the house with him most of my life."
"You may have lived in the house with him, Katie," gently came Ann's
overwhelming response. "You've never understood him."
Katie openly gasped. But some of her anger passed swiftly into a
wondering how much truth there might be in the preposterous statement.
Wayne as "immune" was another idea jeering at her now. And that further
assumption, which had been there all the while, though only now
consciously recognized, that Wayne's knowing Ann's story, made Ann, to
Wayne, impossible--
Living in the same house with people did not seem to have a great deal to
do with knowing their hearts.
"Wayne," Ann had resumed, in voice low and shaken with feeling, "has the
sweetest nature of any one in this world. He's been unhappy just because
he hadn't found happiness. If you could see him with me, Katie, I don't
think you'd say he had an unhappy nature--or worry much about our not
being happy."
Katie was silent, driven back; vanquished, less by the words than by the
light they had brought to Ann's face.
And what she had been wanting--had thought she was ready to fight
for--was happiness--for every one.
"Of course I know," Ann said, "that that's not it." That light had all
gone from her face. It was twisted, as by something cruel, blighting, as
she said just above a whisper: "There's no use pretending we don't know
what it is."
She turned her face away, shielding it with her muff.
It was all there--right there between them--opened, live, throbbing. All
that it had always meant--all that generations of thinking and feeling
had left around it.
And to Katie, held hard, it was true, all too bitterly true, that she
came of what Mrs. Prescott called a long line of fine and virtuous
women. In her misery it seemed that the one thing one need have no fear
about was losing the things they had left one.
But other things had been left her. The war virtues! The braving and the
fighting and the bearing. Hardihood. Unflinchingness. Unwhimperingness.
Those things fought within her as she watched Ann shaken with the sobs
she was trying to repress.
Well at least she would not play the coward's part with it! She brought
herself to look it straight in the face. And what she saw was that if
she could be brave enough to go herself into a more spacious country,
leaving hurts behind, she must not be so cowardly, so ignobly
inconsistent as to refuse the hurts coming to her through others who
would dare. Through the conflict of many emotions, out of much misery,
she at last wrenched from a sore heart the admission that Wayne had as
much right to be "free" as she had. That if Ann had a right to happiness
at all--and she had always granted her that--she had a right to this. It
was only that now it was she who must pay a price for it. And perhaps
some one always paid a price.
"Ann?"
Ann looked up into Katie's colorless, twitching face.
"I hope you and Wayne will be very happy." It came steadily, and with an
attempted smile.
The next instant she was sobbing, but trying at the same time to tell Ann
that sisters always acted that way when told of their brothers'
engagements.