Mary Morrison was late to dinner.  She said she had run across an old Californian friend and they had been having tea together and seeing the shops.  She had no appetite for dinner, which seemed to carry out her story.  Her eyes were as brilliant as stars, and a magnetic atmosphere seemed to emanate from her.  The men all talked to her.  They seemed disturbed—­not themselves.  There was something in her glowing lips, in her swimming glance, in the slow beauty of her motions, that called to them like the pipes o’ Pan.  She was as pagan and as beautiful as the spring, and she brought to them thoughts of elemental joys.  It was as if, sailing a gray sea, they had come upon a palm-shaded isle, and glimpsed Calypso lying on the sun-dappled grass.

XV

That night Kate said she would warn Honora; but in the morning she found herself doubtful of the wisdom of such a course.  Or perhaps she really lacked the courage for it.  At any rate, she put it off.  She contemplated talking to Mary Morrison, and of appealing to her honor, or her compassion, and of advising her to go away.  But Mary was much from home nowadays, and Kate, who had discouraged an intimacy, did not know how to cultivate it at this late hour.  Several days went by with Kate in a tumult of indecision.  Sometimes she decided that the romance between Mary and David was a mere spring madness, which would wear itself out and do little damage.  At other moments she felt it was laid upon her to speak and avert a catastrophe.

Then, in the midst of her indecision, she was commanded to go to Washington to attend a national convention of social workers.  She was to represent the Children’s Protective Agency, and to give an account of the method of its support and of its system of operation.  She was surprised and gratified at this invitation, for she had had no idea that her club and settlement-house addresses had attracted attention to that extent.  She made so little effort when she spoke that she could not feel much respect for her achievement.  It was as if she were talking to a friend, and the size of her audience in no way affected her neighborly accent.

She did not see that it was precisely this thing which was winning favor for her.  Her lack of self-consciousness, her way of telling people precisely what they wished to know about the subject in hand, her sense of values, which enabled her to see that a human fact is the most interesting thing in the world, were what counted for her.  If she had been “better trained,” and more skilled in the dreary and often meaningless science of statistics, or had become addicted to the benevolent jargon talked by many welfare workers, her array of facts would have fallen on more or less indifferent ears.  But she offered not vital statistics, but vital documents.  She talked in personalities—­in personalities so full of meaning that, concrete as they were, they took on general significance—­they