It drew Katie over to the table.  She stretched her hand out across it, as if seeking to bridge something, and spoke with an earnest dignity.  “You say I’m an outsider.  Then won’t you take me in?  I don’t want to be an outsider.  You mustn’t think too badly of me for it because you see I have just stayed where I was put.  But I want to know life.  I love it now, and yet, easy and pleasant though it is, I can’t say that I find it very satisfying.  I have more than once felt it was cheating me.  I’m not getting enough—­just because I don’t know.  Loving a thing because you don’t know it isn’t a very high way of loving it, is it?  I believe I could know it and still love it—­love it, indeed, the more truly.  No, you don’t think so; but I want to try.”  She paused, thinking; then saw it and spoke it strongly.  “I’ve never done anything real.  I’ve never done anything that counted.  That’s why I’m an outsider.  If making a place for you here is going to make one for me there—­on the inside, I mean—­you’re not going to refuse to take me in, are you?”

Something seemed to leap up in the girl’s eyes, but to crouch back, afraid.  “What do you know about me?” she whispered.

“Not much.  Only that you’ve met things I never had to meet, met them much better, doubtless, than I should have met them.  Only that you’ve fought in the real, while I’ve flitted around here on the playground.”  Katie’s eyes contracted to keenness.  “And I wonder if there isn’t more dignity in fighting—­yes, and losing—­in the real, than just sitting around where you get nothing more unpleasant than the faint roar of the guns.  To lose fighting—­or not to fight!  Why certainly there can be no question about it.  What do I know about you?” she came back to it.

“Only that you seemed just shot into my life, strangely disturbing it, ruffling it so queerly.  It’s too ruffled now to settle down without—­more ruffling.  So you’re not going away leaving it in any such distressing state, are you?” she concluded with a smile which lighted her face with a fine seriousness.

She made a last stand.  “But you don’t know.  You don’t understand.”

“No, I don’t know.  And don’t think I ever need know, as a matter of obligation.  But should there ever come a time when you feel I would understand, understand enough to help, then I should be glad and proud to know, for it would make me feel I was no longer an outsider.  And let me tell you something.  In whatever school you learned about life, there’s one thing they taught you wrong.  They’ve developed you too much in suspicion.  They didn’t give you a big enough course in trust.  All the people in this world aren’t designing and cruel.  Why the old globe is just covered with beautiful people who are made happy in doing things for the people about them.”

“I haven’t met them,” were the words which came from the sob.

“I see you haven’t; that’s why I want you to.  Your education has been one-sided.  So has mine.  Perhaps we can strike a balance.  What would you think of our trying to do that?”