"Evidently," was Miss Osborne's reply.

"Though to be sure," Kate further propitiated, resentment at having to do so growing with the propitiation, "that is very narrow of us. I am sure your club will be quite different. We may come to the garden party?"

Katie followed her guest to her car. "I am hoping it will be cooler soon," she said. "My friend is here to grow stronger, and this heat is quite unnerving her."

Miss Osborne accepted it with polite, "I trust she will soon be much better. Yes, the heat is trying."

Katie did not return to Ann, but sat at the head of the steps, looking across the river.

She was genuinely offended. She knew nothing more unpardonable than to embarrass one's hostess. She grew hard in contemplation of it. Nothing justified it;--nothing.

A few girls were still coming from the candy factory. Miss Osborne's car had crossed the bridge and was speeding toward her beautiful home up the river--just the home for a garden party. The last group of girls, going along very slowly, had to step back for the machine to rush by.

Katie forgot her own grievance in wondering about those girls who had waited for the Osborne car to pass.

She knew where Miss Osborne was going, where and how she lived; she was wondering where the girls not enjoying the breeze always to be found in motoring were going, what they would do when they got there, and what they thought of the efforts to help them "manage better" on their dollar or less a day.

It made her rise and return to Ann.

Ann, too, was looking across the river at the girls who had given Miss Osborne right of way. Two very red spots burned in Ann's cheeks and her eyes, also, were feverish.

"I suppose I shouldn't have spoken that way to your friend," she began, but less contritely than defiantly.

Katie flushed. She had been prepared to understand and be kind. But she was not equal to being scoffed at, she who had been so embarrassed--and betrayed.

"It was certainly not very good form," she said coolly.

"And of course that's all that matters," said Ann shrilly. "It's just good form that matters--not the truth."

"Oh I don't see that you achieved any great thing for the truth, Ann.

Anyhow, rudeness is no less rude when called truth."

"Garden parties!" choked Ann.

"I am not giving the garden party, Ann," said Katie long-sufferingly. "I was doing nothing more than being civil to a guest--against rather heavy odds."

"You were pretending to think it was lovely. But of course that's good form!"

Her perilously bright eyes had so much the look of an animal pushed into a corner that Katie changed. "Come, Ann dear, let's not quarrel with each other just because it has been a disagreeable day, or because Caroline Osborne may have a mistaken idea of doing good--and I a mistaken idea of being pleasant. I promised Worth a little spin on the river before dinner. You'll come? It will be cooling."

"My head aches," said Ann, but the tension of her voice broke on a sob.

"If you don't mind--I'll stay here." She looked up at her in a way which remotely suggested the look of that little dog the day before, "Katie, I don't mean you. When I say things like that--I don't mean _you_. I mean--I suppose I mean--the things back of you. All those things--"

She stopped, but Katie did not speak. "You see," said Ann, "there are two worlds, and you and I are in different ones."

"I don't believe in two worlds," said Katie promptly. "It's not a democratic view of things. It's all one world."

"Your Miss Osborne and the fifty cents a day girls--all one world? I am afraid," laughed Ann tremulously, "that even the 'underlying principles of life' would have a hard time making _them_ one."

CHAPTER XVII

Even on the river it was not yet cool. Day had burned itself too deeply upon the earth for approaching night to hold messages for even its favorite messenger. Katie was herself at the steering wheel, and alone with Worth and Queen. She had learned to manage the boat, and much to the disappointment of Watts and the disapproval of Wayne sometimes went about on the river unattended. Katie contended that as a good swimmer and not a bad mechanic she was entitled to freedom in the matter. She held that to be taken about in a boat had no relation to taking a boat and going about in it; that when Watts went her soul stayed home.

Tonight, especially, she would have the boat for what it meant to self; for to Katie, too, the sultry day had become more than sultry day. The thing which pressed upon her seemed less humidity than the consciousness of a world she did not know. It was not the heat which was fretting her so much as that growing sense of limitations in her thought and experience.

She wondered what the man who mended the boats would say about Ann's two worlds.

She suspected that he would agree with Ann, and then proceeded to work herself into a fine passion at his agreeing with Ann against her. "That silly thing of two worlds is fixed up by people who can't get along in the one world," said she. "And that childish idea of one world is clung to by people who don't know the real world," retorted the trouble-maker.

To either side of the river were factories. Katie had never given much thought to factories beyond the thought that they disfigured the landscape. Now she wondered what the people who had spent that hot day in the unsightly buildings thought about the world in general--be it one world or two.

Worth had come up to the front of the boat. The day had weighed upon him too, for he seemed a wistful little boy just then.

She smiled at him lovingly. "What thinking about, Worthie dear?"

"Oh, I wasn't thinking, Aunt Kate," he replied soberly. "I was just wondering."

"You too?" she laughed.

"And what would you say, Worthie," she asked after they had gone a little way in silence, "was the difference between thinking and wondering?"

Worth maturely crossed his knees as a sign of the maturity of the subject. "Well, I don't know, 'cept when you think you know what you're thinking about, and when you wonder you just don't know anything."

"Maybe you wonder when you don't know what to think," Katie suggested.

"Yes, maybe so. There's more to wonder about than there is to think about, don't you think so, Aunt Kate?"

"I wonder," she laughed.

"You do wonder, don't you, Aunt Kate? You wonder more than you think."

She flashed him a keen, queer look.

"Worth," she asked, after another pause in which the mind of twenty-five and the mind of six were wondering in their respective fashions, "do you know anything about the underlying principles of life?"

"The what, Aunt Kate?"

"Underlying principles of life," she repeated grimly.

"Why no," he acknowledged, "I guess I never heard of them."

"I never did either, till just lately. I want to find out something about them. Do you know, Worthie dear, I'd go a long way to find out something about them."

"Where would you have to go, Aunt Kate? Could you go in a boat?"