“But I didn’t—­not that day.  I was so happy that my father suspected something.  And he got it out of me and said I couldn’t go.  He said that the things that would be pictured would be the wickedness of the world.  That I was not to see it.

“But I made up my mind that I would see the wickedness of the world.”  Ann paused, and then said in lower voice:  “And I have—­and not just in pictures.”

She seemed to be meeting something, and she answered it.  “But just the same,” she made answer defiantly, “I’d rather see the wickedness of the world than stay in the nothingness of the world!

“The pictures were to be there a week.  I thought of nothing else but how I could see them.  The last day there was a thimble-bee.  I went to the thimble-bee—­said I couldn’t stay—­and went to the pictures.

“Katie, that moving-picture show was proof.  Proof of the Something Somewhere.  And in my heart I made a vow—­it was a solemn vow—­that I would find the things that moved in the pictures.

“And there was music—­such music as I had never heard before, even though it came out of a box.  They had the songs of the grand opera singers.  And as I listened—­I tell you I was called!—­I don’t care how silly it sounds—­I was called by the voices that had sung into that box.  For this was real—­if the life hadn’t been there it couldn’t have been caught into the pictures and the box.  It proved—­I thought—­that all the lovely things I had dreamed were true.  I had only to go and find them.  People were walking upon those streets.  Then I could walk on those streets.  And those people were laughing—­and talking to each other.  Everybody seemed to have friends.  Everybody was happy!  And all of that really was.  The pictures were alive.  Alive with the things that there were out beyond the nothingness of Centralia.

“The man played something from an opera and showed pictures of beautiful people going into a beautiful place to listen to that very music.  He said that the very next night in Chicago those people would be going into that place to listen to those very voices.

“Katie, I don’t believe you’ll laugh at me when I tell you that my teeth fairly chattered when first it came to me that I must be one of those people!  It was something all different from the longing for fun—­oh it was something big—­terrible—­it had to be.  It was the same feeling of its having to be that I had about Tono.

“Though probably that feeling would have passed away if it hadn’t been for my father.  He came there and found me, and—­humiliated me.  And after we got home—­” Ann was holding herself tight, but after a moment she relaxed to say with an attempted laugh:  “It wasn’t all being ‘called.’  Part of it was being driven.

“Then there was another thing.  The treasurer of the missionary society came that night with some money—­eighteen dollars—­I was to send off the next day.  It was that money started me out to find my Something Somewhere.”