The Visioning | Page 6

a new girl--don't you loathe
'new girls'?--but when I got home I found that one of my dress stays
was digging into me and when I got my dress off I didn't feel half so
broken up about the man."
An odd thing happened; one thing struck away came back. There was a
light in the eyes telling that something human and understanding,
something to link her to other things human, would like to come back.
She looked and listened as to something nearer.
Seeing it, Katie chattered on, against time, about nothing; foolish talk,
heartless talk, it might even seem, to be pouring out to a girl who felt
there was no place for her in life. But it was nonsense carried by
tenderness. Nonsense which made for kinship. It reached. Several times
the girl who thought she must kill herself was not far from a smile and
at last there was a tear on the long lashes.
"So I'm going to undress you," Katie unfolded her plan, encouraged by
the tear, "and then let's just see what hot water can do about it. And
maybe a little rub. I used to rub my mother's spine. She said life always
seemed worth living after I had done that." She patted the hand she held
ever so lightly as she said: "How happy I would be if I could make you
feel that way about it, too. Then I've a dear room to take you into, all
soft grays and greens, and oh, such a good bed! Why you know you're
tired! That's what's the matter with you, and you're just too tired to
know what's the matter."
The girl nodded, tears upon her cheeks, looking like a child that has
had a cruel time and needs to be comforted.

Katie's voice was lower, different, as she went on: "Then after I've
brushed your hair and done all those 'comfy' things I'm going to put you
in a certain, a very special gown I have. It was made by the nuns in a
convent in Southern France. As they worked upon it they sat in a
garden on a hillside. They thought serene thoughts, those nuns. You see
I know them, lived with them. I don't know, one has odd fancies
sometimes, and it always seemed to me that something of the peace of
things there was absorbed in that wonderful bit of linen. It seems far
away from things that hurt and harm. Almost as if it might draw back
things that had gone. I was going to keep it--" Katie's eyes deepened,
there was a little catch in her voice. "Well, I was just keeping it. But
because you are so tired--oh just because you need it so.--I want you to
let me give it to you."
And with a tender strength holding the sobbing girl Katie unfastened
her collar and began taking off her dress.

CHAPTER III
"Kate," demanded Captain Jones, "what's that noise?"
"How should I know?" airily queried Kate.
"I heard a noise in the room above. This chimney carries every sound."
"Nonsense," jeered his sister. "Wayne, you've lived alone so long that
you're getting spooky."
He turned to the other man. "Prescott, didn't you hear something?"
"Believe I did. It sounded like a cough."
"Well, what of it?" railed Kate. "Isn't poor Nora permitted to cough, if
she is disposed to cough? She's in there doing the room for me. I'm
going to try sleeping in there--isn't insomnia a fearful thing? But the
fussiness of men!"

They were in the library over their coffee. Kate was peculiarly
charming that night in one of the thin white gowns she wore so much,
and which it seemed so fitting she should wear. She had been her
gayest. Prescott was thinking he had never known any one who seemed
to sparkle and bubble that way; and so easily and naturally, as though it
came from an inner fount of perpetual action, and could more easily
rise than be held down. And he was wondering why a girl who had so
many of the attributes of a boy should be so much more fascinating
than any mere girl. "There are two kinds of girl," he had heard an older
officer once say. "There are girls, and then there is Katie Jones." He
had condemned that as distinctly maudlin at the time, but recalled it
to-night with less condemnation.
"Katie," exclaimed Wayne, after his sister had read aloud some one's
engagement from the Army and Navy Register, and wondered
vehemently how those two people ever expected to live together,
"Nora's out on the side porch with Watts!"
"Do you disapprove of this affair between Nora and Watts?" Katie
wanted to know, critically inspecting the design on her coffee spoon.
"I