By way of emphasizing her devotion to her work, she ceased answering Ray McCrea’s letters.  She studiously avoided the attentions of the men she met at the Settlement House and at Mrs. Dennison’s Caravansary.  Sometimes, without her realizing it, her thoughts took on an almost morbid hue, so that, looking at Honora with her chaste, kind, uplifted face, she resented her close association with her husband.  It seemed offensive that he, with his curious, half-restrained excesses of temperament, should have domination over her friend who stood so obviously for abnegation.  David manifestly was averse to bounds and limits.  All that was wild and desirous of adventure, in Kate informed her of like qualities in this man.  But she held—­and meant always to hold—­the restless falcons of her spirit in leash.  Would David Fulham do as much?  She could not be quite sure, and instinctively she avoided anything approaching intimacy with him.

He was her friend’s husband.  “Friend’s husband” was a sort of limbo into which men were dropped by scrupulous ladies; so Kate decided, with a frown at herself for having even thought that David could wish to emerge from that nondescript place of spiritual residence.  Anyway, she did not completely like him, though she thought him extraordinary and stimulating, and when Honora told her something of the great discovery which the two of them appeared to be upon the verge of making concerning the germination of life without parental interposition, she had little doubt that David was wizard enough to carry it through.  He would have the daring, and Honora the industry, and—­she reflected—­if renown came, that would be David’s beyond all peradventure.

No question about it, Kate’s thoughts were satiric these days.  She was still bleeding from the wound which her father had inflicted, and she did not suspect that it was wounded affection rather than hurt self-respect which was tormenting her.  She only knew that she shrank from men, and that at times she liked to imagine what sort of a world it would be if there were no men in it at all.

Meantime she met men every day, and whether she was willing to admit it or not, the facts were that they helped her on her way with brotherly good will, and as they saw her going about her singular and heavy tasks, they gave her their silent good wishes, and hoped that the world of pain and shame would not too soon destroy what was gallant and trustful in her.

* * * * *

But here has been much anticipation.  To go back to the beginning, at the end of her first week in the city she had a friend.  It was Marna Cartan.  They had fallen into the way of talking together a few minutes before or after dinner, and Kate would hasten her modest dinner toilet in order to have these few marginal moments with this palpitating young creature who moved to unheard rhythms, and whose laughter was the sweetest thing she had yet heard in a city of infinite dissonances.