Mrs. Prescott made vivid and compelling those days, those things, which Katie had a little while before had the fancy of so easily slipping away from.  She made them things which wove themselves around one, or rather, things of which one seemed an organic part, from which one could no more pull away than the tree’s branch could pull away from the tree’s trunk.

In her presence Katie was claimed by those things out of which she had grown, claimed so subtly that it seemed a thing outside volition.  Mrs. Prescott did not, in any form, say things were as they were; it was only that she breathed it.

How could one combat with words, or in action, that rooted so much deeper than mere words or action?

She was a slight and simple looking lady to be doing anything so large as stemming the tide of a revolutionary impulse.  She had never lost the girlishness of her figure—­or of her hands.  So much had youth left her.  Her face was thin and pale, and of the contour vaguely called aristocratic.  It was perhaps the iron gray hair rolling back from the pale face held the suggestion of austerity.  But that which best expressed her was the poise of her head.  She carried it as if she had a right to carry it that way.

It was of small things she talked:  the people she had met, people they knew whom Katie knew.  It was that net-work of small things she wove around Katie.  One might meet a large thing in a large way.  But that subtle tissue of the little things!

They talked of Katie’s mother, and as they talked it came to Katie that perhaps the most live things of all might be the dead things.  Katie’s mother had not been unlike Mrs. Prescott, save that to Katie, at least, she seemed softer and sweeter.  They had been girls together in Charleston.  They had lived on the same street, gone to the same school, come out at the same party, and Katie’s mother had met Katie’s father when he came to be best man at Mrs. Prescott’s wedding.  Then they had been stationed together at a frontier post in a time of danger.  Wayne had been born at that post.  They had been together in times of birth and times of death.

Mrs. Prescott spoke of Worth, and of how happy she knew Katie was to have him with her.  She talked of the responsibility it brought Katie, and as they talked it did seem responsibility, and responsibility was another thing which stole subtly up around her, chaining her with intangible—­and because intangible, unbreakable—­chains.

Mrs. Prescott wanted to know about Wayne.  Was he happy, or had the unhappiness of his marriage gone too deep?  “Your dear mother grieved so about it, Katie,” she said.  “She saw how it was going.  It hurt her.”

“Yes,” said Katie, “I know.  It made mother very sad.”

“I am glad that her death came before the separation.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Katie; “I think mother would have been glad.”

“She did not believe in divorce; your mother and I, Katie, were the old-fashioned kind of churchwomen.”