But in the book about women she found an envelope addressed: "To one looking for trouble."

This was what was type-written on the single sheet it contained:

"Here are a couple of books warranted to disturb one's peace of mind.

They are marked danger as both warning and commendation. It is absolutely guaranteed that one will not be so pleased with the world--and with one's self--after reading them. There is more--both books and danger--where they came from."

It was signed: "One who loves to lead adventurous souls into dangerous paths."

It was two o'clock when Katie turned off her light that night.

CHAPTER XVI

Perhaps after all it was neither the dog nor the literature, but the heat. For the heat of that next day was the kind to prey through countries of make-believe. It oppressed every one, but Ann it seemed to excite, as if it stirred memories in their sleep. "Don't fight heat, Ann," Katie finally admonished, puzzled and disturbed by the way Ann kept moving about. "The only way to get ahead of the heat is to give up to it."

"Can you always do what you want to do?" Ann demanded with a touch of petulance. "Isn't there ever something makes you do things you know aren't the things to do?"

"Oh, dear me, yes," laughed Kate. "But you're simply your own worst enemy when you try to get ahead of the heat."

"I don't know how you're going to help being your own worst enemy,"

Ann murmured.

She picked some leaves from the vines and threw them away, purposelessly; she made the cat get out of a chair and sat down in it herself, only to get up again and pile all the magazines in a different way, not facilitating anything by the change. Then, after walking the length of the veranda, she stood there looking at Katie: Katie in the coolest and coolest-looking of summer dresses, leaning back in a cool-looking chair--adjusting herself to things as they were, poised, victorious in her submission.

Then Ann said a strange thing. "A hot day's just nothing but a hot day to you, is it?"

The words themselves said less than the laugh which followed them--a laugh which carried both envy and resentment, which at once admired and accused, a laugh straight from the girl they were trying to ignore.

And pray what was a hot day to her, Katie wondered. What _was_ a hot day--save a hot day? But as she watched Ann in the next few moments she seemed to be surveying a figure oppressed less by heat than by that to which the heat laid her open. It seemed that the hot day might stand for the friction and the fretting of the world, for things which closed in upon one as heat closed in, bore down as heat bore down. As Ann pushed back the hair from her forehead it seemed she would push back the weight of the years.

It was at that moment that Caroline Osborne, richest and most prominent girl of the vicinity, stepped from her motor car.

Katie had met her a few nights before at the dance. And Wayne knew her father--a man of many interests. It was his quarrel with the forest service that had brought her cousin Fred Wayneworth there. Fred was not one of his admirers.

"Isn't this heat distressing?" was her greeting, though she had succeeded in keeping herself very fresh and sweet looking under the distress.

As Katie turned to introduce the two girls she saw that Ann was pulling at her handkerchief nervously. Was it irritating to have people for whom hot days were but hot days call heat distressing?

"Though one always has a breeze motoring," she took it up. "There are so many ways in which automobiles make life more bearable, don't you find it so, Miss Jones?"

Katie replied, inanely--Ann was still pulling at her handkerchief--that they were indispensable, of course, though personally she was so fond of horses--.

Yes, Miss Osborne loved horses too. Indeed it was army people had taught her to ride; once when she visited at Fort Riley--she had spent a month there with Mrs. Baxter. Katie knew her?

Oh, yes, Katie knew her, and almost all the rest of the army people whom Miss Osborne told of adoring. Of a common world, they were not long strangers. They came together through a whole network of associations.

Finally they reached South Carolina and concluded they must be related--something about Katie's grandmother and Miss Osborne's great-aunt--.

Katie, in the midst of her interest turning instinctively to include Ann, was curiously arrested. Ann was sitting a little apart. And there seemed so poignant a significance in her sitting apart. It was an order of things from which she sat apart. The network went too far back, too deep down; it was too intricate for either sympathy or ingenuity to shape it at will.

Though Katie tried. For Katie, enough that she was sitting apart, and consciously. Leaving grandmothers and great-aunts in a sadly unfinished state she was lightly off into a story of something which had once happened to her and Ann in Rome.

But Ann was as an actor refusing to play her part. Perhaps she was too resentfully conscious of its being but a part--of her having no approach save through a part. For the first time she failed in that adaptability which had always made the stories plausible. In the midst of her tale Katie met Ann's eyes, and faltered. They were mocking eyes.

As best she could she turned the conversation to local affairs, for Miss Osborne was looking curiously at Miss Jones' unresponsive friend.

And as Ann for the first time seemed deliberately--yes, maliciously to fail--Katie for the first time felt out of patience, and injured. Perhaps the heat was enervating, but was that sufficient reason for embarrassing one's hostess? Perhaps it did make her think of hard things, but was that any reason for failing in the things that made all this possible? It was not appreciative, it was not kind, it did not show the right spirit, Katie told herself as she listened, with what she was pleased to consider both atoning and rebuking graciousness, to the plans for Miss Osborne's garden party.

"It is for the working girls, especially the lower class of working girls, who are in the factories. For instance, the candy factory girls. I am especially interested in that as father owns the candy factory--it is a pet side issue of his. You can see it from here, across the river there on the little neck of land. You see? The girls are just beginning to come from work now."

The three girls looked across the river, where groups of other girls were quitting a large building. They could be seen but dimly, but even at that distance something in the prevalent droop suggested that they, too, had found the day "distressingly warm."

"I hadn't realized," said Katie, "that making candy was such serious business."

"It couldn't have been very pleasant today," their guest granted, "but I believe it is regarded a very good place to work."

The book Katie had been reading the night before had shown her the value of facts when it came to judging places where women worked, and she was moved to the blunt inquiry: "How much do those girls make?"

"About six dollars a week, I believe," Miss Osborne replied.

Katie watched them: the long dim line of girls engaged in preparation of the sweets of life. She was wondering what she would have thought it worth to go over there and work all day. "Then each of those girls made a dollar today?" she asked, and her inflection was curious.

"Well--no," Miss Osborne confessed. "The experienced and the skillful made a dollar."

"And how much," pressed Katie, "did the least experienced and skillful make?"

"Fifty cents, I believe," replied Miss Osborne, seeming to have less enthusiasm when the scientific method was employed.

There was a jarring sound. The girl "sitting apart" had pushed her chair still farther back. "You call that a good place to work?" She addressed it to Miss Osborne in voice that scraped as the chair had scraped.

"Why yes, as places go, I believe so. Though that is why I am giving the garden party. They do need more pleasure in their lives. It is one of the under-lying principles of life--is it not?--that all must have their pleasures."

Ann laughed recklessly. Miss Osborne looked puzzled; Katie worried.

"And we are organizing this working girl's club. We think we can do a great deal through that."

"Oh yes, help them get higher wages, I suppose?" Katie asked innocently.

"N--o; that would scarcely be possible. But help them to get on better with what they have. Help them learn to manage better."

Again Ann laughed, not only recklessly but rudely. "That is surely a splendid thing," she said, and the voice which said it was high-pitched and unsteady, "helping a girl to 'manage better' on fifty cents a day!"

"You do not approve of these things?" Miss Osborne asked coldly.

And with all the heat Katie felt herself growing suddenly cold as she heard Ann replying: "Oh, if they help you--pass the time, I don't suppose they do any harm."

"You see," Katie hastened, "Miss Forrest and I were once associated with one of those things which wasn't very well conducted. I fear it--prejudiced us."