“Oh Ann!” whispered Katie, drawing back.  “But of course,” she added, “you paid it back just as soon as you could?”

“I never paid it back!  If I had eighteen million dollars, I’d never pay it back!  I like to think of not paying it back!”

Katie’s face hardened.  “I can’t understand that.”

“No,” sobbed Ann, “you’d have to have lived a long time in nothingness to understand that—­and some other things, too.”  She looked at her strangely.  “There’s more coming, Katie, that you won’t be able to understand.”

Katie’s face was averted, but something in Ann’s voice made her turn to her.  “I think it was wrong, Ann.  There’s no use in my pretending I don’t.  I can’t understand this.  But maybe I can understand some of the other things better than you think.”

“I left at six o’clock the next morning,” Ann went back to it when she was calmer.  “And at the last minute I don’t think I would have had the courage to go if my father hadn’t been snoring so.  How silly it all sounds!

“And the only reason I got on the train was that it would have taken more courage to go back than to go on.

“Katie, some time I’ll tell you all about it.  How I felt when I got to Chicago.  How it seemed to shriek and roar.  How I seemed just buried under the noise.  How I walked around the streets that day—­frightened almost to death—­and yet, inside the fright, just crazy about it.  And how green I was!

“Nothing seemed to matter except going to grand opera.  I didn’t even have sense enough to find a place to stay.  I thought about it, but didn’t know how, and anyhow the most important thing was finding the things that moved in the pictures—­and sang in the box.

“I saw a woman go up to a policeman and ask him where something was and he told her, so I did that, too.  Asked him where you went to hear grand opera.  And he pointed.  I was right there by it.

“I heard some people talking about going in to get tickets.  So I thought I had better get a ticket.

“But they didn’t have any.  They were all gone.

“When I came out I was almost crying.  Then a smiling man outside stepped up to me and said he had tickets and he’d let me have one for ten dollars.  I was so glad he had them!  Ten dollars seemed a good deal—­but I didn’t think much about it.

“Then I had my ticket and just two dollars left.

“But that night at the opera I didn’t know whether I had two dollars, or no dollars, or a thousand dollars.  At first I was frightened because everybody but me had on such beautiful clothes.  But soon I was too crazy about their clothes to care—­and then after the music began—­

“Oh, Katie!  Suppose you’d always dreamed of something and never been able to catch up with it.  Suppose you’d not even been able to really dream it, but just dream that it was, and then suppose it all came—­No, I can’t tell you.  You’d have to have lived in Centralia—­and been a minister’s daughter.