in the sun and kicked up her heels longer than she had any business to, and now she’s flying along to keep the most enchanting engagement she ever had in all her life.  She’s smiling to herself to think how bad she was to lie in the sand so long, and she’s not at all concerned, because she knows her friends will be so happy to see her that they’ll forget to scold her for being late.  Katie’s spoiled,” the Major concluded, “but we like her that way.”

Of Wayne this same friend remarked:  “Wayne’s a hard nut to crack.”

Many army people felt that way.  In fact, Wayne was a nut the army itself had not quite cracked.  Some army people maintained that Wayne was disagreeable.  But that may have been because he was not just like all other army people.  He did not seem to have grasped the idea that being “army” set him apart.  Sometimes he made the mistake of judging army affairs by ordinary standards.  That was when they got some idea of how the cat felt.  And of all cats an army cat would most resent having its fur rubbed in any but the prescribed direction.

Katie, continuing her ruminations about Wayne as the product of things, had come to see that with it all he was detached from those desirable things which had produced him.  One knew that Wayne had traditions, yet he was not tradition fettered; he suggested ancestors without being ancestor conscious.  Was it the gun—­as Wayne the Worthy persisted in calling it—­and the gun’s predecessors—­for Wayne always had something—­made him so distinctly more than the mere result of things which had formed him?  “It is the gun,” Katie decided, taking him in with half shut eyes as a portrait painter might.  “Had the same ancestors myself, and yet I’m both less and more of them than he is.  What I need’s a gun!  Then I’d stand out of the background better, too.”  Then with one of Katie’s queer twists of fancy—­Ann!  Might not Ann be her gun?  Perhaps she had been wanting a gun for a long time without knowing what it was she was wanting when surely wanting something.  Perhaps every one felt the gun need to make them less the product and more the person.

Then there was another thing.  The thing that had traced those lines about Wayne’s mouth, and had whitened, a little, the brown hair of his temples.  Wayne had cared for Clara.  Heaven only knew how he could—­Katie’s thoughts ran on.  Perhaps heaven did understand those things—­certainly it was too much for mere earth.  Why Wayne, about whom there had always seemed a certain brooding bigness, certainly a certain rare indifference, should have fallen so absurdly in love with the most vain and selfish and vapid girl that ever wrecked a post was more than Katie could make out.  And it had been her painful experience to watch Wayne’s disappointment develop, watch that happiness which had so mellowed him recede as day by day Clara fretted and pouted and showed plainly enough that to her love was just a convenient thing which might impel one’s husband to get