As had happened that other time, in relation to the suit, the thing shot out at Ann turned back to her.  It had more than once occurred that the thing thrown out sparingly persisted as thing to be considered genuinely.  Her browbeating of Ann—­for it was a sort of tender, protective browbeating—­led her to reach out blindly for weapons, and once in her hand many of those weapons proved ideas.

“We take everything we can get,” she followed it up, forcing herself from interest in the weapon to the use of it, “from everybody we can get it from.  We take this house from the government—­and heaven only knows how many sons of toil the government takes it from.  I take this money we’re so stupidly quibbling about now from a company the papers say takes it from everybody in reach.  Take or you will be taken from is the basis of modern finance.  Please don’t be fanatical, Ann.”

“I can’t take it,” repeated Ann.

Katie looked worried.  Then she took new ground.  “Well, Ann, if you won’t take the sane financial outlook, at least be a good sport.  We’re in this game; the money has got to be part of making it go.  We’ll never get anywhere at all if we’re going to balk and fuss at every turn.  There now, honey,”—­as if to Worth—­“put your book away.  Don’t lose it; it makes them cross to have you lose them.  And another principle of modern finance with which I am heartily in sympathy is that money should be kept in circulation.  It encourages embezzlement to leave it in banks too long.”  Then, seeing what was gathering, she said quietly but authoritatively:  “Leave it unsaid, Ann.  Can’t we always just leave it unsaid?  Nothing makes me so uncomfortable as to feel I’m constantly in danger of having something nice said to me.”

Perhaps Katie knew that countries of make-believe are sensitive things, that it does not do to admit you know them for that.

There had been that one time when the hand of reality reached savagely into the dream, as if the things the girl had run away from had come to claim her.  It seemed through that long night that they had claimed her, that Ann’s “vacation” was over.

Captain Prescott had been dining with them that night and after dinner they were sitting out on the porch.  He was humming a snatch of something.  Katie heard a chair scrape and saw that Ann had moved farther into the shadow.  She was all in shadow save her hand; that Katie could see was gripping the arm of her chair.

He turned to Ann.  “Did you see ’Daisey-Maisey’?”

“Ann wasn’t here then,” said Kate.

“Did you see it, Katie?”

“No.”

“It was a jolly, joyous sort of thing,” he laughed.  “Sort of thing to make you feel nothing matters.  That was the name of that thing I was humming.  No, not ‘Nothing Matters,’ but ‘Don’t You Care.’  And there were the ‘Don’t You Care’ girls—­pink dresses and big black hats.  They seemed to mean what they sang.  They didn’t care, certainly.”