She knew how Ann felt.  There was joy in the good stroke.  In this other game she had been playing in the last thirty days—­this more difficult and more alluring game—­she had come to know anew the exhilaration of bunker cleared, the satisfaction of the long drive and the sure putt.

And Katie had played a good game.  It was not strange she should have convinced others, for there were times when her game was so good as to convince even herself.  Though it had ever been so with Kate.  The things in the world of “Let’s play like” had always been persuasive things.  Curious she was to know how often or how completely Ann was able to forget they were playing a game.

She had come to think of Ann, not as a hard-and-fast, all-finished product, but as something fluid, certainly plastic.  It was as if anything could be poured into Ann, making her.  A dream could be woven round her, and Ann could grow into that dream.  That was a new fancy to Kate; she had always thought of people more as made than as constantly in the making.  It opened up long paths of wondering.  To all sides those paths were opening in those days—­it was that that made them such eventful days.  Down this path strayed the fancy how much people were made by the things which surrounded them—­the things expected of them.  That path led to the vista that amazing responsibility might lie with the things surrounding—­the things expected.  It even made her wonder in what measure she would have been Katie Jones, differently surrounded, differently called upon.  Her little trip down that path jostled both her approval of herself and her disapproval of others.

It was only once or twice that the real girl had stirred in the dream.  For the most part she had remained in the shadow of Katie’s fancyings.  She was as an actor on the stage, inarticulate save as regards her part.  Katie had grown so absorbed in that part that there were times of forgetting there was a real girl behind it.  Often she believed in her friend Ann Forrest, the dear girl she had known in Florence, the poor child who had gone through so many hard things and was so different from the Zelda Frasers of the world.  She rejoiced with Wayne and Captain Prescott in seeing dear Ann grow a little more plump, a little rosier, a little more smiling.  She could understand perfectly, as she had made them understand, why Ann did not talk more of Italy and the things of her own life.  Life had crowded in too hard upon her, that setting of the other days made other days live again too acutely.  Ann was taking a vacation from her life, she had laughingly put it to Wayne.  That was why she played so much with Worth and the dogs and talked so little of grown-up things.  Though one could never completely take a vacation from one’s life; that was why Ann looked that way when she was sometimes sitting very still and did not know that any one was looking at her.

Persuasion was the easier as fabrication was but a fanciful dress for truth.  Imagination did not have it all to do; it only followed where Ann called—­blazing its own trail.