As she continued her walk, winding in and out of the wooded paths, awe spread its great wings about her at thought of the complexity and the fathomlessness of the relationships of life.  She had but a little peep into them, but that peep held the suggestion of limitlessness.

Because a lonely girl in a barren little town in Indiana had dreamed dreams which life would not deliver to her, life now was beating in upon Katie Jones.  Because Ann had been foiled in her quest for happiness, sobering shadows were falling across the sunny path along which Katie had tripped.  Did life thwarted in one place take it out in another?  Because Ann could not find joy was it to be that Katie could not have peace?  Had Ann’s yearning for love been the breath blowing to flame Katie’s yearning for understanding?  Because Ann could not dream her way to realities did it mean that Katie must fight her way to them?

They were such big things—­such resistless things—­these wild new things which were sweeping in upon her.  With the emotion of the world surging in and out like that how could any one claim to have a solution for the whole question of living?

She seemed passing into a country too big and too dark for her of the sunny paths.  She needed a guide.  She grew lonely at thought of how badly she needed her guide.

She turned for comfort to thought of the things she would do for Ann.  She would pay it back in revealing to Ann the beauty of the world.  She would assume the responsibility of the Something Somewhere.  Perhaps in fulfilling a dream she would find a key to reality.

She found pleasure in the vision of Ann in the old world cathedrals.  How wisely they had builded—­builders of those old cathedrals—­in expressing religion through beauty.  At peace in the beauty of form, might Ann not find an inner beauty?  She believed Ann’s nature to be an intensely religious one.  How might Ann’s soul not flower when she at last saw God as a God of beauty?

Thus she soothed herself in building a future for Ann.  Sought to appease those surgings of life with promise that Ann should at last find the loveliness of life.

But in the end it led to a terrifying vision.  A vision of thousands upon thousands of other dreamers of dreams whose soul stuff might be slowly ebbing away in long dreary days of putting suspenders in boxes.  Of thousands of other girls who might be growing faint in operating the wires for life.  Oh, she had power to fill Ann’s life—­but would that have power to still for her the mocking whispers from the dreams which had died slow deaths in all the other barren lives?  Even though she took Ann from the crowd to a far green hill of happiness, would not Katie herself see from that far green hill all the other girls “called” to life, going forth as pilgrims with the lovely love-longing in their hearts only to find life waiting to seize them for the work of the woman who wore the white furs?