Major Darrett, too, was to be congratulated on his father-in-law.  Just the father-in-law for a man ambitious to become military attache.

It was nice, Katie told herself as she walked away, to know of so many weddings.  She insisted upon asserting to herself that she was glad all her friends were getting on so famously.

Though if Zelda persisted, she would have to go West earlier than she had planned.  She could not regard Ann’s sister-in-law as suitable person for attendant at Major Darrett’s wedding.  That would be a little too much like playing the clown at a masked ball.

The image was suggested by seeing one of those grotesque figures across the street.  He was advertising some approaching festivity.  With the clown was a monkey.  He put the monkey down on the sidewalk and it danced obediently in just the place where it was put down.

Suddenly it seemed to Katie that she was for all the world like that monkey—­dancing obediently in the place where she was put down, not asking about the before or after, just dutifully being gay.  That monkey did not know the great story about monkeys; doubtless he was even too degraded by clowns to yearn for a tree.  He only danced at the end of the string the clown held—­all else shut out.

She—­shutting out the before and after—­was that pathetically festive little monkey; and society was the clown holding the string—­the whole of it advertising the tawdry thing the clown called life.

Only she knew that there were trees.  She had danced frantically in seeking to forget them, but the string pulled by the clown fretted her more and more.

She could not make clear to herself why it had seemed that if Wayne were to be “free,” she could not be; it was as if all the things she had worked out for herself had been appropriated by her brother.  Everybody could not go into more spacious countries!  There were some who must stay behind and make it right for the deserters.

Wayne’s marrying Ann had turned her back to familiar paths.  It had terrified her.  There seemed too much involved, too little certainty as to where one would find one’s self if one left the well-known ways.

She had been put in the position of the one hurt just when she had been steeled to bring the hurt.  It gave her a new sense of the hurts—­uncertainty as to the right to deal them.

And probably no monkey would dance more obediently than the monkey who had run away and been frightened at a glimpse of the vastness of the forest.

She would have to remain and explain Wayne, because she felt responsible about Wayne.  It was her venturings had found what had led Wayne to venture—­and, in the end, go.  How could she outrage the army as long as Wayne had done so?

So it had seemed to Katie in her hurt and bewilderment.  And the bewilderment came chiefly because of the hurt.  It appalled her to find it did hurt like that.