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.

“Yes, though fun isn’t the word, for I don’t mean just good times.  I mean—­I mean—­”

“You mean the joy of living,” said Katie.  “You mean the loveliness of life.”

“Yes; now your kind of religion—­the kind of religion your kind of people have, doesn’t seem to hurt them any.”

Katie laughed oddly.  “True; it doesn’t hurt us much.”

“My father’s kind is something so different.  The love of God seems to have dried him up.  He’s not a human being.  He’s a Christian.”

Katie thought of her uncle—­a bishop, and all too human a human being.  She was about to protest, then considered that she had never known the kind of Christian—­or human being—­Ann was talking about.

“Everything at our church squeaked.  The windows.  The organ.  The deacon’s shoes.  My father’s voice.  The religion squeaked.  Life squeaked.

“I’ll tell you a story, Katie, that maybe will make you see how it was.  It’s about a dog, and it’s easy for you to understand things about dogs.