There came a mad impulse to do so.  To say:  “I first met her right down there at the edge of the water.  She was about to commit suicide.  I don’t know why.  I think she was one of those ‘Don’t You Care’ girls you admired in ‘Daisey-Maisey.’  But I’m not sure of even that.  I didn’t want her to kill herself, so I took her in and pretended she was a friend of mine.  I made the whole thing up.  I even made up her name.  She said her name was Verna Woods, but I think that’s a made-up name, too.  I haven’t the glimmering of an idea what her real name is, who her people are, where she came from, or why she wanted to kill herself.”

Then what?

First, bitter reproaches for Katie.  She would be painted as having violated all the canons.

For the first time, watching her friend’s face softened by his dreams, seeing him as his mother’s son, she questioned her right to violate them.  She did not know why she had not thought more about it before.  It had seemed such a joke on the people in the enclosure.  But it was not going to be a joke to hurt them.  Was that what came of violating the canons?  Was the hurt to one’s friends the punishment one got for it?

“You can’t cauterize the wounds with the story of the dog’s hard life,” Wayne had said of poor little unpetted—­and because unpetted, unpettable—­Pet.

Was Watts the real philosopher when he said “things was as they was”?

She was bewildered.  She was in a country where she could not find her way.  She needed a guide.  Her throat grew tight, her eyes hot, at thought of how badly she needed her guide.

Then, perhaps in self-defense, she saw her friend Captain Prescott, not as a victim of the violation of canons, but as a violator of them himself.  She turned from Ann’s past to his.

“Harry,” she asked, in rather metallic voice, “how about that affair of yours down in Cuba?”

He flushed with surprise and resentment.  “I must say, Katie,” he said stiffly, “I don’t see what it has to do with this.”

“Why, I should think it might have something to do with it.  Isn’t there a popular notion that our pasts have something to do with our futures?”

“It’s all over,” he said shortly.

“Then you would say, Harry, that when things are over they’re over.  That they needn’t tie up the future.”

“Certainly not,” said he, making it clear that he wanted that phase of the conversation “over.”

“It’s my own theory,” said Katie.  “But I didn’t know whether or not it was yours.  Now if I had had a past, and it was, as you say yours is, all over, I shouldn’t think it was any man’s business to go poking around in it.”

“That,” he said, “is a different matter.”

“What’s a different matter?” she asked aggressively.

“A woman’s past.  That would be a man’s business.”

“Though a man’s past is not a woman’s business?”

“Oh, we certainly needn’t argue that old nonsense.  You’re too much the girl of the world to take any such absurd position, Katie.”