It seemed a saving thing that they could so rejoice.

Katie was reading the little book on man’s evolution which the man who was having much to do with her evolution had—­it seemed long ago—­sent her in the package marked “Danger.”  She had finished the book about women and was just looking through the one on evolution on the day Caroline Osborne’s car had stopped at her door.  That began a swift series of events leaving small place for reading.  But when, that last day they were together in Chicago, she asked him about something to read, he suggested a return to that book.  There seemed wisdom and kindness in the suggestion.  The story of evolution was to the mind what the game of golf was to the body.  With the life about her pressing in too close there was something freeing and saving in that glimpse of herself as part of all the life there had ever been.  Because the crowds had seemed the all—­were suffocating her—­something in that vastness of vision was as fresh air after a stifling room.  It was not that it did away with the crowds—­made her think they did not matter; they were, after all, the more vital—­imperative—­but she had more space in which to see them, was given a chance to understand them rather than be blindly smothered by them.

For a number of years Katie had known that there was such a thing as evolution.  It had something to do with an important man named Darwin.  He got it up.  It was the idea that we came from monkeys.  The monkey was not Katie’s favorite animal and she would have been none too pleased with the idea had it not been that there was something so delicious about solemn people like her Aunt Elizabeth and proper people like Clara having come from them.  She was willing to stand it herself, just because if she came from them they did, too.  She had assumed all along that she believed in Darwin and that people who did not believe in him were benighted.  But the chief reason she had for believing in him was that the church had not believed in him.  That was through neither malice nor conviction as regards the church, but merely because it was exciting to have some one disagreeing with it.  It had thrilled her as “fearless,” She had always meant to find out more about evolution, she had a hazy idea that there was a great deal more to it than just the fact of having come from monkeys, but she led such a busy life—­bridge and things—­that there was never time and so it remained a thing she believed in and was some day going to find out about.

Now she was furious with herself and with everybody connected with her for having lived so much of her life shut out from the knowledge—­vision—­that made life so vast and so splendid.  It was like having lived all one’s life in sight of the sea and being so busy walking around a silly little lake in a park that there was no time to turn one’s face seaward.  She wondered what she would think of a person who said the little toy lake kept her so busy there was never a minute to turn around and take a good look at the sea!