“‘Katherine,’ a worldly-wise aunt of mine said to me once, ’you have two grave faults.  One is telling the truth.  The other is telling lies.  I have never known you to fail in telling the one when it was a time to tell the other.’  Can’t you see what a curse it is to mix times that way?”

As one too tired to resist the tide, not accepting, but going with it for the minute because the tide was kindly and the force to withstand it small, the girl, her arm upon the table, her head leaning wearily upon her hand, sat there looking at Katie, that combination of the non-accepting and the unresisting which weariness can breed.

Kate seemed in profound thought.  “Of course, you would naturally be suspicious of me,” she broke in as if merely continuing the thinking aloud; Katie’s fashion of doing that often made commonplace things seem very intimate—­a statement to which considerable masculine testimony could be affixed.  “I don’t blame you in the least.  I’d be suspicious, too, in your place.  It’s not unnatural that, not knowing me well, you should think I had some designs about ‘doing good,’ or helping you, and of course nothing makes self-respecting persons so furious as the thought that some one may be trying to do them good.  Now if I could only prove to you, as could be proved, that I never did any good in my life, then perhaps you’d have more belief in me, or less suspicion of me.  I wonder if you would do this?  Could you bring yourself to stay just long enough to see that I am not trying to do you good?  Fancy how I should feel to have you go away looking upon me as an officious philanthropist!  Isn’t it only square to give me a chance to demonstrate the honor of my worthlessness?”

Still the girl just drifted, her eyes now revealing a certain half-amused, half-affectionate tenderness for the tide which would bear her so craftily.

“And speaking of honor, moves me to my usual truth-telling blunder, and I can’t resist telling you that in one respect I really have designs on you.  But be at peace—­it has nothing to do with your soul.  Never having so much as discovered my own soul, I should scarcely presume to undertake the management of yours, but what I do want to do is to feed you eggs!

“No—­now don’t take it that way.  You’re thinking of eggs one orders at a hotel, or—­or a boarding-house, maybe.  But did you ever eat the eggs that were triumphantly announced by the darlingest bantam—?”

She paused—­beaten back by the things gathering in the girl’s face.

“Tell me the truth!” it broke.  “What are you doing this for?  What have you to gain by it?”

“I hadn’t thought just what I had to—­gain by it,” Katie stammered, at a loss before so fierce an intensity.  “Does—­must one always ‘gain’ something?”

“If you knew the world,” the girl threw out at her, “you’d know well enough one always expects to gain something!  But you don’t know the world—­that’s plain.”