“She was leaving that day for San Francisco.  She gave me ten dollars, and told me if I had any sense I’d take it and go back to prayer-meeting.  She said I might do worse.  But if I didn’t have any sense—­and she said of course I wouldn’t—­I was to be careful of it until I got a job.  She told me how to manage.  And I was to read ‘ads’ in the newspaper.  She told me how to try and get in at the telephone office.  She had been there once, she said, but it ‘got on her nerves.’

“She told me things about girls who worked in Chicago—­awful things.  But I supposed she was prejudiced.  The last things she said to me was—­’The opera!  Oh you poor little green kid—­I’m afraid I see your finish.’

“But I thought she was queer acting because she led that queer kind of a life.”

Ann had paused.  And suddenly she hid her face in her hands, as if it was more than she could face.  Katie was smoothing her hair.

“Katie, as the days went on it was just as hard to believe that the world of the opera was the same world I was working in—­right there in the same city—­as it had been the first night to believe it was the same world as Centralia.  I learned two things.  One was that the Something Somewhere was there.  The other that it was not there for me.

“The world was full of things I couldn’t understand, but I could understand—­a little better—­the woman who wore the white furs.

“Oh Katie, you get so tired—­you get so dead—­all day long putting suspenders in a box—­or making daisies—­or addressing envelopes—­or trying to remember whether it was apple or custard pie—­

“And you don’t get tired just because your back aches—­and your head aches—­and your hands ache—­and your feet ache—­you get tired—­that kind of tired—­because the city doesn’t care how tired you get!

“I often wondered why I went on, why any of them went on.  I used to think we must be crazy to be going on.”

She was pondering it—­somberly wistful.  “Though perhaps we’re not crazy.  Perhaps it’s the—­call.  Katie, what is it?  That call?  That thing that makes us keep on even when our Something Somewhere won’t have anything to do with us?”

Katie did not reply.  She had no reply.

“At last I got in the telephone office.  That’s considered a fine place to work.  They’re like Miss Osborne; they believe it is one of the fundamental principles of life that all must have pleasures.  But they were like the pleasures of Centralia—­not God-fearing, exactly, but so dutiful.  They didn’t have anything to do with ‘calls.’

“The real pleasures were going over the wire.  It was my business to make the connections that arrange those pleasures.  A little red light would flash—­sometimes it would flash straight into my brain—­and I’d say ’Number, please?’—­always with the rising inflection.  Then I’d get the connection and Life would pass through the cords.  That was the closest I came to it—­operating