The Visioning | Page 5

seemed to belong to each other, so how must it not be with
those other things, inner things, oh, things one did not know what to

call? Was it because she could not get things together it seemed to her
she must make them all stop? Was that it? Did people lose the power to
hold themselves in the one that made you _you_?
What could do that? Something that reached the center; not many
things could; something, perhaps, that kept battering at it for a long
time, and just shook it at first, and then--
It was too dreadful to think of it that way. She tried to make herself
stop.
The girl's face was turned to the out-of-doors; to a great tree in front of
the window, a tree in which some robins had built their nests. Such a
tired face! So many tear marks, and so much less reachable than tear
stains.
A beautiful face, too. If all were back which the blow at the center had
struck away, if she had all of her--if lighted--it would be a rarely
beautiful face.
The girl was like a flower; a flower, it seemed to Kate, which had not
been planted in the right place. The gardener had been unwise in his
selection of a place for this flower; perhaps he had not used the right
kind of soil, perhaps he had put it in the full heat of the sun when it was
a flower to have more shade; perhaps too much wind or too much
rain--Katie wondered just what the mistake had been. For the flower
would have been so lovely had the gardener not made those mistakes.
Even now, it was lovely: lovely with a saddening loveliness, for one
saw at a glance how easily a breeze too rough could beat it down. And
one knew there had been those breezes. Every petal drooped.
A strange desire entered the heart of Katherine: a desire to see whether
those petals could take their curves again, whether a color which
blunders had faded could come back to its own. She was like the new
gardener eager to see whether he can redeem the mistakes of the old.
And the new gardener's zeal is not all for the flower; some of it is to
show what he can do, and much of it the true gardener's passion for

experiment. Katie Jones would have made a good gardener.
And yet it was something less cold than the experimenting instinct
tightened her throat as she looked at the frail figure of the girl for
whom life had been too much.
"I must go now," she was saying, with what seemed mighty effort to
summon all of herself over which she could get command. "You are all
right now. I must go."
But she sank back in the chair, as if that one thing left at the center
pulled her back, crying out that if it could but have a little more time
there--
The girl in blue linen was sitting at the feet of the girl in pink organdie.
She had hold of her hand, so slim a hand. Everything about the girl was
slim, built for favoring breezes.
"I have one thing more to ask." It was Kate's voice was not well
controlled this time.
"You may call it a whim, a notion, foolish notion; call it what you like,
but I want you to stay here to-night."
The girl was looking down at her, down into the upturned face, all light
and strength and purpose as one standing apart and disinterested might
view a spectacle. Slowly, comprehendingly, dispassionately she shook
her head. "It would be--no use."
"Perhaps," Katie acquiesced. "Some of the very nicest things in life
are--no use. But I have something planned. May I tell you what it is I
want to do?"
Still she did not take her eyes from Katie's kindling face, looking at it
as at something a long way off and foreign.
"I am not a philanthropist, have no fears of that. But I have an idea, a
theory, that what seem small things are perhaps the only things in life

to help the big things. For instance, a hot bath. I can't think of any
sorrow in the world that a hot bath wouldn't help, just a little bit."
"Now we have such a beautiful bathroom. I loathe hot baths in tiny
bathrooms, where the air gets all steamy and you can't get your breath.
Perhaps one thing the matter with you is that all the bathrooms you've
been in lately were too small. Of course, you didn't know that was one
thing the matter; like once at a dance I thought I was very sad about a
man's dancing so much with another girl,