The winter had passed and it was late in April, not unlike that May day just the year before when she had first seen her sister-in-law.  Try as she would she could not keep her thoughts from that day and all that it had opened up.

She had received a letter from her sister-in-law that morning.  It was hard to realize that the writer of that letter was the Ann of the year before.

Her thoughts of Ann led seductively to the old wonderings which Ann had in the beginning opened up.  She wondered how many of the people with whom things were all wrong, people whom good people called bad people, were simply people who had been held from their own.  She wondered how many of those good people would have remained good people had life baffled them, as it had some of the bad people.  The people whom circumstances had made good people were so sure of themselves.  She had observed that it was from those who had never sailed stormy waters came the quickest and harshest judgments on bad seamanship in heavy seas.

Ann had met Helen and did not seem to know just what to think about her.  “She’s nice, Katie,” she wrote, “but I don’t understand her very well.  She has so many strange ideas about things.  Wayne thinks you and she would get on famously.  She doesn’t seem afraid of anything and wants to do such a lot of things to the world.  I’m afraid I’m selfish; I’m so happy in my own life—­it’s all so wonderful—­that I can’t get as excited about the world as Helen does.”

And yet Ann would not have found the world the place she had found it were it the place Helen would have it.  But Ann had found joy and peace—­safety—­and was too happy in her own life to get excited about the world—­and thought Helen a little queer!

That was Ann’s type—­and that was why there were Anns.

Ann was radiant about the mountains and their life in them.  “Helen said it about right, Katie.  They’re hard on the hair and the skin—­but good for the soul!” They would be for the summer in one of the most beautiful mountain towns of Colorado and wanted Katie to come and bring Worth.  Wayne had consented to leave him for a time with Katie at their uncle’s.  That Katie knew for a concession received for staying in New York with Ann until after her marriage.

She believed she would go.  She was so tired of Zelda Fraser that she would like to meet Helen.  And she would like the mountains.  Perhaps they would do something for her soul—­if she had not danced it quite away.  She was getting very wretched about having to be so happy all the time.

She was on her way to Zelda’s that afternoon, Zelda having asked her to come in for a cup of tea and a talk.  A whiff of some new scandal, she supposed.  That was the basis of most of Zelda’s “talks.”

Though possibly she had some things to tell about Harry Prescott’s approaching marriage to Caroline Osborne.  Katie had been asked to be a bridesmaid at that wedding.