And he came at a time when she had great need of him.  Never before had there been so many things to start one on imaginary conversations, conversations which ended usually in a limitless wondering.  Since Ann had come the simplest thought had a way of opening a door into a vast country.

Too many doors were opening that afternoon.  She was making no headway with the letters she had told herself she would dispose of while Ann and Captain Prescott were out on the links.

The letter from Harry Prescott’s mother was the most imperative.  She was returning from California and sent some inquiries as to the habitability of her son’s house.

Katie was thinking, as she re-read it, that it was a letter with a background.  It expressed one whom dead days loved well.  The writer of the letter seemed to be holding in life all those gentlewomen who had formed her.

In a short time Mrs. Prescott would be at the Arsenal.  That meant a more difficult game.  Did it also mean an impossible one?

Yet Katie would prefer showing her Ann to Mrs. Prescott than to Zelda Fraser.  Zelda, the fashionable young woman, would pounce upon the absence of certain little tricks and get no glimmer of what Katie vaguely called the essence.  Might not Mrs. Prescott find the reality in the possibilities?  “It comes to this,” Katie suddenly saw, “I’m not shamming, I’m revealing.  I’m not vulgarly imitating; I’m restoring.  The connoisseur should be the first to appreciate that.”

It turned her off into one of those long paths of wondering, paths which sometimes seemed to circle the whole of the globe.  It was on those paths she frequently found the man who mended the boats waiting for her.  Sometimes he was irritating, turning off into little by-paths, by-paths leading off to the dim source of things.  Katie could not follow him there; she did not know her way; and often, as to-day, he turned off there just when she was most eager to ask him something.  She would ask him what he thought about backgrounds.  How much there was in that thing of having the background all prepared for one, in simply fitting into the place one was expected to fit into.  How many people would create for themselves the background it was assumed they belonged in just because they had been put in it?  Suddenly she laughed.  She had a most absurd vision of Jove—­Katie believed it would be Jove—­standing over humanity with some kind of heroic feather duster and mightily calling “Shoo!—­Shoo!—­Move on!—­Every fellow find his place for himself!”

Such a scampering as there would be!  And how many would be let stay in the places where they had been put?  Who would get the nice corners it had been taken for granted certain people should have just because they had been fixed up for them in advance?  How about the case of Miss Katherine Wayneworth Jones?  Would she be ranked out of quarters?