She saw at a glance that Wayne related Ann to the things her appearance suggested rather than to the suggestions causing that appearance.  As Katie said, “Ann, I am so glad that at last my brother is to know you,” she was thinking that it seemed a friend to whom one might indeed be proud to present one’s brother.  She never lost the picture of the Ann whom Wayne advanced to meet.  She loved her in that rose pink muslin, the skirt cascaded in old-fashioned way, an old-fashioned looking surplice about the shoulders, and on her long slim throat a lovely Florentine cameo swinging on the thinnest of old silver chains.  She might have been a cameo herself.

And she never forgot the way Ann said her first words to Wayne.  They were two most commonplace words, merely the “Thank you” with which she responded to his hospitable greeting, but that “Thank you” seemed let out of a whole under sea of feeling for which it would try to speak.

Before Wayne could carry out his unmistakable intention of saying more, Katie was airily off into a story about the cook, dragging it in with a thin hook about the late dinner, and the cook in the present case suggested a former cook in Washington whom Katie held, and sought to prove, nature had ordained for a great humorist.  The ever faithful subject of cooks served stanchly until they had reached the safety of soup.

Katie was in story-telling mood.  She seemed to have an inexhaustible fund of them in reserve which she could deftly strap on as life-preserver at the first far sign of danger.  And she would flash into her stories an “As you said, Ann,” or “As you would put it, Ann,” whenever she found anything to fit the Ann she would create.

Several times, however, the rescuing party had to knock down good form and trample gentle breeding under foot to reach the spot in time.  Wayne spoke of a friend in Vienna from whom he had heard that day and turned to Ann with an interrogation about the Viennese.  Katie, contemplating the suppleness of Ann’s neck, momentarily asleep at her post, missed the “Come over and help us” look, and Ann had begun upon a fatal, “I have never been in—­” when Katie, with ringing laugh broke in:  “Isn’t it odd, Ann, that you should never have been in Vienna, when you lived all those years right there in Florence?  I do think it the oddest thing!”

Ann agreed that it was odd—­Wayne concurring.

But driven from Vienna, he sought Florence.  “And Italy?  I presume I go on record as the worst sort of bounder in asking if you really care greatly about living there?”

Katie thought it time Ann try a stroke for herself.  One would never develop strength on a life-preserver.