He looked so unhappy that she laughed.  “Oh I don’t know, uncle, what I mean to ‘take up,’ but I herewith serve notice that I’m going to take something up—­something besides bridge and army gossip.”

She looked at him reflectively.  “Uncle, does it ever come home to you that life’s a pretty serious business?”

“Well I hadn’t wanted it to come home to me tonight,” he sighed plaintively.  “I’m really most upset about this unfortunate affair.  I had thought that you, Katie, would be pleasant.”

“Forgive me,” she laughed.  “I can see how it must disturb you, uncle, to hear me express a serious thought.”

He laughed at her delightedly.  He loved Katie.  “You’ve got the fidgets, Katie.  Just the fidgets.  That’s what’s the matter with the whole lot of you youngsters.  It’s becoming an epidemic—­a sort of spiritual measles.  Though I must say, I hadn’t expected you to catch it.  And just a word of warning, Katie.  You’ve always been so unique as a trifler that one rather hates to see you swallowed up in the troop of serious-minded young women.  I was talking to Darrett the other day—­charming fellow, Darrett—­and he held that your charm was in your brilliant smile.  I told him I hadn’t thought so much about the brilliant smile, but that I knew a good deal about a certain impish grin.  Katie, you have a very disreputable grin.  You have a way of directing it at me across ponderous drawing-rooms that I wish you’d stop.  It gives me a sort of—­’Oh I am on to you, uncle old boy’ feeling that is most—­”

“Disconcerting?”

“Unreverential.”

He looked at her, humorously and yet meditatively—­fondly.  “Katie, why do you think it’s so funny?  Why does it make you want to grin?”

“You know.  Else you wouldn’t read the grin.”

“But I don’t know.  Nobody else grins at me.”

“Oh don’t you think we’re a good deal of a joke, uncle?”

“Joke?  Who?—­Why?”

“Us.  The solemnity with which we take ourselves and the way the world lets us do it.”

He laughed.  Then, as one coming back to his lines:  “You have no reverence.”

“No, neither have you.  That’s why we get on.”

He made an unsuccessful attempt at frowning upon her and surveyed her a little more seriously.  “Katie, do you know that the things you say sometimes puzzle me.  They’re queer.  They burrow.  They’re so insultingly knowing, down at the root of their unknowingness.  I’ll think—­’She didn’t know how “pat” that was’—­and then as I consider it I’ll think—­’Yes, she did, only she didn’t know that she knew.’  I remember telling your mother once when you were a little girl that if you were going to sit through service with your head cocked in that knowing fashion I wished she’d leave you at home.”

Katie laughed and cocked her head at him again, just to show she had not forgotten.  Then she fell serious.

“Uncle, for a long time I only smiled.  I seemed to know enough to do that.  Do you think you could bear it with Christian fortitude if I were to tell you I’m beginning now to try and figure out what I was smiling at?”