Katie wondered what else Watts had been able to get a glimpse of.

Wayne was so bent on being abused (hot days affected people differently) that the only way she could get him to relinquish a grievance for a pleasure was to put it in the form of a duty.  Ann needed a ride on the river, Katie affirmed, and so they had gone, Wayne doing his best to cover his pleasure.

“Men never really grow up,” she mused to Wayne’s back.  “Every so often they have to act just like little boys.  Only little boys aren’t half so apt to do it.”

Though perhaps Wayne had been downright disappointed at not having the boat for Ann when he came home.  Was he meaning to deliver that lecture on the army?  She hoped that whatever he talked about it would bring Ann home without that strained, harassed look.

And now Katie was talking to Captain Prescott and thinking of the man who mended the boats.  Captain Prescott was a good one to be talking to when one wished to be thinking of some one else.  He called one to no dim, receding distances.

She was thinking that in everything save the things which counted most he was not unlike this other man—­name unknown.  Both were well-built, young, vigorous, attractive.  But life had dealt differently with them, and they were dealing differently with life.  That made a difference big as life itself.

From the far country in which she was dreaming she heard Captain Prescott talking about girls.  He was talking sentimentally, but even his sentiment opened no vistas.

And suddenly she remembered how she had at one time thought it possible she would marry him.  The remembrance appalled her; less in the idea of marrying him than in the consciousness of how far she had gone from the place where marrying him suggested itself to her at all.

Life had become different.  This showed her how vastly different.

But as he talked on she began to feel that it had not become as different to him as to her.  He had not been making little excursions up and down unknown paths.  He had remained right in his place.  That place seemed to him the place for Katie Jones.

As he talked on—­about what he called Life—­sublimely unconscious of the fences all around him shutting out all view of what was really life—­it became unmistakable that Captain Prescott was getting ready to propose to her.  She had had too much experience with the symptoms not to recognize them.

Katie did not want to be proposed to.  She was in no mood for dealing with a proposal.  She had too many other things to be thinking of, wondering about.

But she reprimanded herself for selfishness.  It meant something to him, whether it did to her or not.  She must be kind—­as kind as she could.

The kindest thing she could think of was to keep him from proposing.  To that end she answered every sentimental remark with a flippant one.

It grieved, but did not restrain him.  “I had thought you would understand better, Katie,” he said.