“Rather an assumption, isn’t it, that a man would have—­”

“Why not at all, if he has done enough during his brief lifetime to warrant the assumption.”

“Is her mother living?”

“Oh no,” said Katie irritably, “certainly not.  Her mother has been dead—­five years.”  Then, looking into the dreamy distance and drawing it out as though she loved it:  “Her mother was a great musician.”

“I shan’t like her,” announced Wayne decisively; “she is probably exotic and self-conscious and supercilious, and not at all a comfortable person to have about.  It’s bad enough for her father to have been a great artist—­without her mother needs having been a great musician.”

“She is simple and sweet and very shy,” reproved Kate.  “So shy that she will doubtless be painfully embarrassed at meeting you, and seem—­well, really ill at ease.”

“That will be an odd spectacle—­a young woman of to-day ’painfully embarrassed’ at meeting a man.  I never saw any of them very ill at ease, save when there were no men about.”

“Ann’s experiences have not all been happy ones, Wayne,” said Katie in the manner of the deeply understanding to one of lesser comprehension.

“I hope she’ll go on sleeping.  A young woman of artistic people—­painfully embarrassed—­unhappy experiences—­it doesn’t sound at all comfortable to me.”

But a little later he said:  “Prescott seems to think that Daisey-Maisey company not bad.  If you girls would like to go we’ll telephone for seats.”

Katie paused in the eating of a peach.  “Thank you, Wayne, but I have an idea—­just a vague sort of idea—­that Ann would not care especially for that.”

“She’s probably right,” said Wayne, returning with relief to the blue prints.

Katie’s sporting blood was up.  Ann was to be Ann.  Never in her life had she been so fascinated with anything as with this creation of an Ann.

“I have prepared a place for her,” she mused, over the untucking of the softest of rose pink muslins.  “I have prepared for her a family and a temperament and a sorrow and all that a young woman could most desire.  From out the nothing a conscious something I have evoked.  It would be most ungracious—­ungrateful—­of Ann to refuse to be what I made her.  I invented her.  By all laws of decency, she must be Ann.  Indeed, she is Ann.”

And Katie was truly beginning to think so.  Katie’s imagination coquetted successfully with conviction.

Ann, or more accurately the idea of Ann, fascinated her.  Never before had she known any one all unencumbered, unbound, by facts.  Most people were rendered commonplace by the commonplace things one knew about them.  But Ann was as interesting as one’s brain could make her.  Anything one choose to think—­or say—­about Ann could just as well as not be true.  It swept one all unchained out into a virgin land of fancy.