Katie was humbly silent.  She had thought she knew the world.  She had lived in the Philippines and Japan and all over Europe and America.  She would have said that the difference between her and this other girl was in just that thing of her knowing the world—­being of it.  But there seemed nothing to say when Ann told her so emphatically that she did not know the world.

The girl seemed on fire.  “No, of course not; you don’t know the world—­you don’t know life—­that’s why you don’t know what an unheard-of thing you’re doing!  What do you know about me?” she thrust at her fiercely.  “What do you think about me?”

“I think you have had a hard time,” Katie murmured, thinking to herself that one must have had hard time—­

“And what’s that to you?  Why’s that your affair?”

“It’s not exactly my affair, to be sure,” Katie admitted; “except that we seem to have been—­thrown together, and, as I said, there’s something about you that I’ve—­taken a fancy to.”

It drew her, but she beat it back.  Resistance made her face the more stern as she went on:  “Do you think I’m going to impose on you—­just because you know so little?  Why with all your cleverness, you’re just a baby—­when it comes to life!  Shall I tell you what life is like?” Her gaze narrowed and grew hard.  “Life is everybody fighting for something—­and knocking down everybody in their way.  Life is people who are strong kicking people who are weak out of their road—­then going on with a laugh—­a laugh loud enough to drown the groans.  Life is lying and scheming to get what you want.  Life is not caring—­giving up—­getting hardened—­I know it.  I loathe it.”

Katie sat there quite still.  She was frightened.

“And you!  Here in a place like this—­what do you know about it?  Why you’re nothing but an—­outsider!”

An outsider, was she?—­and she had thought that Ann—­

The girl’s passion seemed suddenly to flow into one long, cunning look.  “What are you doing it for?” she asked quietly with a sort of insolently indifferent suspicion.

“I don’t know,” Katie replied simply.  “At least until a minute ago I didn’t know, and now I wonder if perhaps, without knowing it, I was not trying to make up for some of those people—­for I fear some of them were friends of mine—­who have gone ahead by kicking other people out of their way.  Perhaps their kicks provided my laughs.  Perhaps, unconsciously, it—­bothered me.”

Passion had burned to helplessness, the appealing helplessness of the weary child.  She sat there, hands loosely clasped in her lap, looking at Katie with great solemn eyes, tired wistful mouth.  And it seemed to Kate that she was looking, not at her, but at life, that life which had cast her out, looking, not with rage now, but with a hurt reproachfulness in which there was a heartbreaking longing.