“Please walk with me, Miss Barrington,” said Wickersham.  “I want you to explain the universe to me.”

“I can do that nicely,” retorted Kate, “because Dr. von Shierbrand has already explained it to me.”

Blue-eyed Mary was pouting.  She never liked any variety of amusement, conversational or otherwise, in which she was not the center.

* * * * *

So Kate’s life sped along.  It was not very significant, perhaps, or it would not have seemed so to the casual onlooker, but life is measured by its inward rather than its outward processes, and Kate felt herself being enriched by her experiences.

She enjoyed being brought into contact with the people she met in her work—­not alone the beneficiaries of her ministrations, but the policemen and the police matrons and the judges of the police court.  She joined a society of “welfare workers,” and attended their suppers and meetings, and tried to learn by their experience and to keep her own ideas in abeyance.

She could not help noticing that she differed in some particulars from most of these laborers in behalf of the unfortunate.  They brought practical, unimaginative, and direct minds to bear upon the problems before them, while she never could escape her theories or deny herself the pleasure of looking beyond the events to the causes which underlay them.  This led her to jot down her impressions in a notebook, and to venture on comments concerning her experiences.

Moreover, not only was she deeply moved by the disarrangement and bewilderment which she saw around her, but she began to awaken to certain great events and developing powers in the world.  She read the sardonic commentators upon modern life—­Ibsen, Strindberg, and many others; and if she sometimes passionately repudiated them, at other times she listened as if she were finding the answers to her own inquiries.  It moved her to discover that men, more often than women, had been the interpreters of women’s hidden meanings, and that they had been the setters-forth of new visions of sacredness and fresh definitions of liberty.

It was these men—­these aloof and unsentimental ones—­who had pointed out that the sin of sins committed by women had been the indifference to their own personalities.  They had been echoers, conformers, imitators; even, in their own way, cowards.  They had feared the conventions, and had been held in thrall by their own carefully nursed ideals of themselves.  They had lacked the ability to utilize their powers of efficiency; had paid but feeble respect to their own ideals; had altogether measured themselves by too limited a standard.  Failing wifely joy, they had too often regarded themselves as unsuccessful, and had apologized tacitly to the world for using their abilities in any direction save one.  They had not permitted themselves that strong, clean, robust joy of developing their own powers for mere delight in the exercise of power.