It gave her new understanding of Ann.  Ann was one who must rest in the wonder of talking of nothing.  It was for that she had gone down.  The world had destroyed her for the very thing for which life loved her—­Katie joining with the world.

She would not have done that to-night.  To-night, in the face of all the world, she must have joined with life.

She wondered if all along it was not the thing for which she had most loved Ann.  This shy new thing in her own heart seemed revealing Ann.  It was kin to her, and to Katie’s feeling for her.

Many times she had wondered why she cared so terribly, would ask herself, as she could hear her friends asking if they knew:  “But does it matter so much as all this?”

She had never been able to make clear to herself why it mattered so much—­mattered more than anything else mattered.  None of the reasons presenting themselves on the surface were commensurate to the depth of the feeling.  To-night she wondered if deep below all else might not lie that thing of Ann’s representing life, her failure with Ann meaning infidelity to life.

It turned her to Ann’s letter;—­she had not had the courage to read it for a number of days.

“Katie,” Ann had written, “I’m writing to try and show you that you were not all wrong.  That there was something there.  And I’m not doing it for myself, Katie.  I’m doing it for you.

“If I can just forget I’m writing about myself, feel instead that I’m writing about somebody you’ve cared for, believed in, somebody who has disappointed and hurt you, trying to show you—­for your sake—­if I don’t mind being either egotistical or terrible for the sake of showing you—­

“It’s not me that matters, Katie—­it’s what you thought of me.  That’s why I’m writing.

“I never could talk to you right.  For a long time I couldn’t talk at all, and then that night I talked most of the night I didn’t tell the real things, after all.  And at the last I told you something I knew would hurt you without telling you the things that might keep it from hurting, without saving for you the things you had thought you saw.  I don’t know why I did that—­desperate, I suppose, because it was all spoiled, frantic because I was helpless to keep it from being spoiled.  And then I said things to you—­that must show—­And yet, Katie, as long as I’m trying to be honest I’ve got to say again, though all differently, that I was surprised—­shocked, I suppose, at something in the way you looked.  It’s just a part of your world that I don’t understand.  It’s as I told you—­we’ve lived in different worlds.  Things—­some things—­that seem all right in yours—­well, it’s just surprising that you should think them all right.  In your world the way you do things seems to matter so much more than what you do.