"Think what it means to a girl like Caroline Osborne! A girl who is trying to do something for humanity--to find the people she wants to uplift so trivial--so without souls!"

"It is hard on Cal," agreed Cal's father.

"Though perhaps just a trifle harder," ventured Wayne, "on the girl who did."

"Well, what did she do it for?" he demanded. "Come now, Captain, you can't make out much of a case for her. Mrs. Leonard's word is just right--trivial. She said she was tired of things. Tired--tired--tired of things, she put it. Tired of walking down the same street. Tired of hanging her hat on the same kind of a peg! Now, Captain--if you can put up any defense for a girl who kills herself because she's tired of hanging her hat on a certain kind of peg! Well," he laughed, "if you can, all I've got to say is that you'd better leave the army and go in for criminal law."

"Why didn't she walk down some other street," he resumed, as no one broke the pause. "If it's a matter of life and death--a person might walk down some other street!"

"And I've no doubt," said Captain Prescott, "that if it were known her life, as well as her hat, hung upon it--she might have had a different kind of peg."

They laughed.

"Oh, of course, the secret of it is," pronounced the Colonel, "she was a neurotic."

For the first time Katie spoke. "I think it's such a fine thing we got hold of that word. Since we've known about neurotics we can just throw all the emotion and suffering and tragedy of the world in the one heap and leave it to the scientists. It lets _us_ out so beautifully, doesn't it?"

"Oh, but Katie!" admonished Mrs. Prescott. "Think of it! What is the world coming to? Going forth to meet one's God because one doesn't like the peg for one's hat!"

Katie had a feeling of every nerve in Ann's body leaping up in frenzy.

"_God_?" she laughed wildly. "Don't drag _Him_ into it! Do you think _He_ cares"--turning upon Mrs. Prescott as if she would spring at her--"do you think for a minute _He_ cares--_what kind of pegs our hats are on_!"

CHAPTER XXI

Katie's memory of what followed was blurred. She remembered how relieved she was when Ann's laugh--oh the memory of that laugh was clear enough!--gave way to sobbing. Sobbing was easier to deal with. She said something about her friend's being ill, and that they would have to excuse them. She almost wanted to laugh--or was it cry?--herself at the way Harry Prescott was looking from Ann to his mother. After she got Ann in the house she went back and begged somebody's pardon--she wasn't sure whose--and told Colonel Leonard that of course he could understand it on the score of Ann's being a neurotic. She was afraid she might have said that rather disagreeably. And she believed she told Mrs. Prescott--she had to tell Mrs. Prescott something, she looked so frightened and hurt and outraged--that Ann had a form of nervous trouble which made it impossible for her to hear the name of God.

The hardest was Wayne. She came to him on the porch after the others had gone--they were not long in dispersing. "Wayne," she said, "I'm sorry to have embarrassed you."

His short, curt laugh did not reveal his mood. It was scoffing--contemptuous--but she could not tell at what it scoffed. He had not turned toward her.

"I'm sorry," she repeated. "Ann will be sorry. She's so--"

He turned upon her hotly. "Katie, quit lying to _me_. I know there's something you're not telling. I've suspected it for some time. Now don't get off any of that 'nervous trouble' talk to me!"

She stood there dumbly.

It seemed to enrage him. "Why don't you go and look after her! What do you mean by leaving her all alone?"

So she went to look after her.

Ann looked like one who needed looking after. Her eyes were intolerably bright. It seemed the heat behind them must put them out.

She was walking about the room, walking as if something were behind her with a lash.

"You see, Katie," she began, not pausing in the walking--her voice, too, as though a whip were behind it--"it was just as I told you. It was just as I tried to tell you. There are two worlds. There's no use trying to put me in yours. See what I bring you! See what you get for it! See what--"

She stood still, rocking back and forth as she stood there. "It was too much for me to hear her talking about _God!_ That was a little too much!

_My_ father was a minister!" And Ann laughed.

A minister was one thing Katie had not thought of. Even in that moment she was conscious of relief. Certainly the ministry was respectable.

But why should it be "too much" for the daughter of a minister to hear anything about God?

"Ann," she began quietly, "I don't want to force anything. If you want to be alone I'll even take my things and sleep somewhere else. But, Ann, dear, if you could tell me a little I wouldn't be so much in the dark; I could do better for us both."

Ann did not seem to notice what she was saying. "She was tired of things!

She was tired of things! Tired of hanging her hat on the same kind of peg! Why it's awful--it's awful, I tell you--to always be hanging your hat on the same kind of peg!

"She was tired of not having any fun! Oh so tired of not having any fun!

Why you don't care what you do when you get tired of not having any fun!

"Then people laugh--the people who have all the fun. Oh they think it's so funny!--the people who don't have to hang their hats on any kind of peg. So trivial. So--what's that nervous word? Katie--you're not like the rest of them! Why, you seem to _know_--just know without knowing."

"But it's hard for me," suggested Katie. "Trying to know--and not knowing."

Ann was still walking about the room. "I was brought up in a little town in Indiana. You see I'm going to tell you. I've got to be doing something--and it may as well be talking. Now how did I start? Oh yes--I was brought up in a little town in Indiana. Until three years ago, that was where I lived. Were you ever in a little town in Indiana?"

Katie replied in the negative.

"Maybe there are little towns in Indiana that are different. I don't know. Maybe there are. But this one-in this one life was just one long stretch of hanging your hat on exactly the same kind of peg!

"It was so square--so flat--so dingy--oh, so dreadful! It didn't have anything around it--as some towns do--a hill, or a river, or woods.

Around it was something that was just nothing. It was just walled in by the nothingness all around it.

"And the people in it were flat, and square, and dingy. And the things around them were just nothing. They were walled in, too, by the nothingness all around them."

Then the most unexpected of all things happened. Ann smiled. "Katie, I'd like to have seen you in that town!"

"I'm afraid," said Katie, "that I would have invented a new kind of peg."

The smile seemed to have done Ann good. She sat down, grew more natural.

"When I try to tell about my life in that town I suppose it sounds as though I were making a terrible fuss about things. When you think of children that haven't any homes-that are beaten by drunken fathers--starved--overworked-but it was the nothingness. If my father only had got drunk!"

Katie smiled understandingly.

"Katie, you've a lot of imagination. Just try to think what it would mean never to have what you could really call fun!"

Katie took a sweep back over her own life--full to the brim of fun. Her imagination did not go far enough to get a real picture of life with the fun left out.

"Oh, of course," said Ann, "there were pleasures! My father and the people of his church were like Miss Osborne--they believed it was one of the underlying principles of life--only they would call it 'God's will'--that all must have pleasure. But such God-fearing pleasure! I think I could have stood it if it hadn't been for the pleasures."

"Pleasures with the fun left out," suggested Kate.