"Then, how dare I? Loving you--laughing, splendid you--how can I?

"Because I believe that you love me. Remembering that light in your eyes, knowing _you_, I dare believe that the hurts would be less than the hurt of being spared those hurts.

"I can hear your friends denouncing me. Hear their withering arguments, and I'll own that at times they do wither. But, Katie, I just can't seem to _stay_ withered!

"You're such an upsetting person, dear Katie. To both heart and philosophy. It's not possible to hate a world that Katie's in. World that didn't spoil Katie. And if there are many of the _you_--oh no other real you!--but many who, awakened, can fight as you can fight and love as you can love--wouldn't it be a joke on us revolutionists if we were cheated out of our revolution just by the love in the hearts of the Katies?

"Well, nobody would be so happy in that joke as would the defrauded revolutionists!

"You make me wonder, Katie, if perhaps it isn't less the vision than the visioning. Less the thing seen than that thing of striving to see. Make me feel the narrowness in scorning the trying to see just because not agreeing with the thing seen. Sometimes I have a new vision of the world.

Vision of a world visioning. Of the vision counting less than the visioning.

"Those moments of glow bear me to you. Persuade me that our visions must be visioned together.

"Life's all empty without you. The radiance is not there. In these days light comes only through dreams, and so I dream dreams and see visions.

"Dreams of _us_--visions of the years we'd meet together. And you are not bowed and broken in those visions, Katie. You're very strong and buoyant--and always eager for life--and always tender. No, not _always_ tender. Sometimes fighting! Telling me I don't know what I'm talking about. It's a splendid picture of Katie fighting--eyes shining, cheeks red.

"And then at the very height of her scorn, Katie happens to think of something funny. And she says the something funny in her inimitable way. Then she laughs, and after her laugh she's tender again, and says she loves me, though still maintaining I didn't know what I was talking about!

"And in the visions there are times when Katie is very quiet. So still.

Hushed by the wonder of love. Then Katie's laughing eyes are deep with mystery, Katie's face seems melted to pure love, and from it shines the light that makes life noble.

"In these days of a fathomless loneliness I dare not look long upon that vision.

"Do you ever hear a call, dear heart? A call to a freer country than any country you have known? Call to a country where the things which bind you could bind no more? And if in fancy you sometimes let yourself drift into that other country, am I with you there? Do you ever have a picture of our venturing together into the unknown ways--daring--suffering--rejoicing--_growing_? Sometimes sunshine and sometimes storm--but always open country and everwidening sky-line. Oh Katie--how splendid it might be!"

She read and re-read it, dreaming and picturing. And at length there settled upon her that stillness, that pause before life's wonder and mystery. Her eyes were deep. The light that makes life noble glorified her tender face.

She broke from it at last to look for a card they had there giving dates of sailings.

CHAPTER XXXVII

They would get in late that afternoon. Off on the horizon was a hazy mass which held the United States of America, as sometimes the haze of a dream may hold a mighty truth.

Katie and Mrs. Prescott were having a brisk walk on deck. They paused and peered off at that mist out of which New York must soon shape itself.

"Just off yonder's your country, Katie," the older woman was saying.

"Soon you'll see the flag flying over Governor's Island. Will it make you thrill?"

"It always has," replied Katie.

Mrs. Prescott stole a keen look at her, seeing that she was not answered.

They had had some strange talks on that homeward trip, talks to stir in the older woman's mind vague apprehensions for the daughter of her old friend. It did not seem to Mrs. Prescott what she called "best" that a woman--and particularly an unmarried one--should be doing as much thinking as Katie seemed to be doing. She wished Katie would not read such strange books; she was sure Walt Whitman, for one, could not be a good influence. What would happen to the world if the women of Katie's class were to--let down the bars, she vaguely and uneasily thought it.

And she was too fond of Katie to want her to venture out of shelter.

"Well it ought to, Katie dear. I don't know who has the right to thrill to it, if you haven't. Doesn't it make you think of those sturdy forefathers of yours who came to it long ago, when it was an unknown land, and braved dangers for it? Your people have always fought for it, Katie. There would be no country had not such lives as theirs been given to it."

Katie was peering off at the faint outlines which one moment seemed discernible in the mist and the next seemed but a phantom of the imagination, as the truth which is to stand out bold and incontestable may at first suggest itself so faintly through the dream as to be called a phantom of the imagination. "True," she said. "And fine. And equally true and fine that there's just as much to fight for now as there ever was."

"Oh yes," murmured Mrs. Prescott, "we must still have the army, of course."

"The fighting's not in the army," said Katie, to herself rather than to her friend.

The older woman sighed. "I'm afraid I don't understand you, Katie." After a pause she added, sadly: "Something seems happening in the world that is driving older people and younger people apart."

Katie turned to her affectionately. "Oh, no."

But more affectionately than convincingly. Mrs. Prescott looked at her wistfully: so strong, so buoyant, so fearless and so fine; she felt an impulse to keep her, though for what--from what--she would not have been able to say.

"Katie dear," she said gently, "I get a glimpse of what you mean in there still being things to fight for. You mean new ideas; new things. I know you're stirred by something. I feel your enthusiasm; it shines from your face. Enthusiasm is a splendid thing in the young, Katie. In any of us. New things there always are to fight for, of course. But, dear Katie--the old things? Those beautiful _old_ things which the generations have left us? Things fought for, tested, mellowed by our fathers and mothers, and their fathers and mothers? Aren't they a little too precious, too hardly won, too freighted with memories to be lightly cast aside?"

Katie looked at her friend's face, itself so incontestably the gift of the generations. It made vivid her own mother's face, and that her own struggle. "I don't think," she said tremulously, "that you are justified in saying they are 'lightly' cast aside."

They were silent, looking off at the land which was breaking through the mists, responding in their different ways to the different things it was saying to them.

"It seems to me," Mrs. Prescott began uncertainly, "that it is not for women--particularly women to whom they have come as directly as to you and me--to cast them off at all. We seem to be in strange days. Days of change. To me, Katie, it seems that the work for the women--_our_ women--is in preserving those things, dear things left to us, holding them safe and unharmed through the destroying days of change."

She had grown more sure of herself in speaking.

The last came staunchly.

"It seems," she added, "that it would be enough for us to do. And the thing for which we are best fitted."

Katie was silent; she could not bear to say to her friend--her mother's friend--that it did not seem to her enough to do, or the thing for which she was best fitted.

She was the less drawn to the idea because of a face she could see down in the steerage: face of an immigrant girl who was also turning eager face, not to the land for which her forefathers had fought, but to that which would be the land of her descendants.

She had seen her there before, face set toward the land into which she was venturing. She had become interested in her. She seemed so eager. And thinking back to the things seen in her search for Ann, other things she had been reading of late, a fear for that girl--pity for her--more than that, sense of responsibility about her grew big in Katie.

It made it seem that there was bigger and more tender work for women than preserving inviolate those things women had left. As she drew near the harbor of New York she was more interested in the United States of America as related to that girl than as associated with her own forefathers who had fought for it long before.

And as it had been for them to fight in the new land, it seemed that it was for her, not merely to cherish the fact of their having fought, not holding that as something apart--something setting her apart, but to fight herself; not under the old standards because they had been their standards, but under whatsoever standards best served the fight. It even seemed that the one way to keep alive those things they had left her was to let them shape themselves in whatever form the new spirit--new demands--would shape them.

Mrs. Prescott was troubled by her silence. "Katie dear," she said, "you come of a long line of fine and virtuous women. In these days when everything seems attacked--endangered--_that_, at least--that thing most dear to women--most indispensable--must be held inviolate. And by such as you. Wherever your ideas may carry you, don't let _that_ be touched.

Remember that the safety of the world for women goes, if you do."

It turned Katie to Ann. Safety _she_ had found. Then again she looked down at the immigrant girl--beautiful girl that she was. And wondered.

And feared.

She turned to Mrs. Prescott with a tear on her eyelashes and a smile a little hard about her lips. "Would you say that 'fine and virtuous women'

have succeeded in keeping the world a perfectly safe place for women?"

Mrs. Prescott was repelled, but Katie did not notice. She was looking with a passionate sternness off at New York. "Let _anything_ be touched,"