And into this had rushed a victim of the battles of peace!  From the stony paths of peace there to the well-kept roads of war!

The irony of it struck Katie anew:  the incongruity of choosing so well-regulated a place for the performance of so disorderly an act as the taking of one’s life.  Choosing army headquarters as the place in which to desert from the army of life!  Such an infringement of discipline as seeking self-destruction in that well-ordered spot where the machinery of destruction was so peacefully accumulated!

She looked covertly at Ann; she could do it, for the girl seemed for the most part unconscious of her.  She was leaning back in the comfortably rounded corner of the stanhope, her hands lax in her lap, her eyes often closed—­a tired child of peace drinking in the peace furnished by the military, was Ann.  It was plain that Ann was one who could drink things in, could draw beauty to her as something which was of her, something, too, it seemed, of which she had been long in need.  Could it be that in the big outside world into which these new wonderings were sent, world which they seemed to penetrate but such a little way, there were many who did not find their own?  Might it not be that some of the most genuine Florentines had never been to Florence?

And because all this was of Ann, it was banishing the things it could not assimilate.  Those hurt looks, fretted looks, that hard look, already Kate had come to know them, would come, but always to go as Ann would swiftly raise her head to get the song of a bird, or yield her face to the caress of a soft spring breeze.  Katie was grateful to the benign breezes, rich with the messages of opening buds, full, tender, restoring, which could blow away hard memories and bitter visions.  Yet those same breezes had blown yesterday.  Why could they not reach then?  What was it had closed the door and shut in those things that were killing Ann?  What were those things that had filled up and choked Ann’s poor soul?

From a hundred different paths she kept approaching it, could not keep away from it.  One read of those things in the papers; they had always seemed to concern a people apart, to be pitied, but not understood, much less reached.  Overwhelming that one who had wished to kill one’s self should be enjoying anything!  That a door so tragically shut should open to so simple a knock!  Mere human voice reach that incomprehensible outermost brink!  Were they not people different, but just people like one’s self, who had simply fallen down in the struggle, and only needed some one to help them up, give them a cool drink and chance for a moment’s rest? Were the big and the little things so close?  One’s own kind and the other kind just one kind, after all?

“I love winding roads,” Katie was saying, after a long silence.  “I suppose the thing so alluring about them is that one can never be sure just what is around the bend.  When I was a little girl I used to pretend it was fairies waiting around the next curve, and I have never—­”