“I’ve gone, Katie, and as far as I’m concerned it’s what has to be.  You see you couldn’t fit me in.  The only thing I can do for you now is to—­stay gone.  You’ll feel badly—­oh, I know that—­but in the end it won’t be as bad as trying to fit me in, trying to keep it up.  And I can’t have you doing things for me in another way—­as you’d want to—­because—­it’s hard to explain just what I mean, but after I’ve been Ann I couldn’t be just somebody you were helping.  It meant too much to me to be Ann to become just a girl you’re good to.

“What I’d rather do—­want this letter to do—­is keep for you that idea of Ann—­memory of her.

“So that’s why I want to tell you about some things that really were Ann.  I haven’t any more right to you, but I want you to know you have some right to her.

“I told you that I was standing on the corner, and that he asked me to get in the automobile, and that I did, and that that—­began it.  It was true.  It was one way to put it.  I’ll try and put it another way.

“It isn’t even fair to him, putting it that way.  You know, of course, that he’s not in the habit of asking girls on corners to go with him.  I think—­there at the first—­he was sorry for me.  I think it was what you would call an impulse and that being sorry for me had more to do with it than anything else.

“And I know I wasn’t fair to myself when I put it that way; and you weren’t fair to me when you called it common and low.  That’s what I want to try and show you—­that it wasn’t that.

“It was in the warm weather.  It had been a hot, hard day.  Oh they were all hot, hard days.  I didn’t feel well.  I made mistakes.  I was scolded for it.  I quarreled with one of the girls about washing my hands!  She said she was there before I was and that I took the bowl.  We said hateful things to each other, grew furious about it.  We were both so tired—­the day had been so hot—­

“Out on the street I was so ashamed.  It seemed that was what life had come to.

“That afternoon I got something that was going over the wire.  You get so tired you don’t care what’s going over the wire—­you aren’t alive enough to care—­but I just happened to be let in to this—­a man’s voice talking to the girl he loved.  I don’t remember what he was saying, but his voice told that there were such things in the world—­and girls they were for.  One glimpse of a beautiful country—­to one in a desert.  I don’t know, perhaps that’s why I talked that way to the other poor girl who was tired—­perhaps that’s why I went in the automobile.

“I had to ride a long way on the street car to get where I boarded.  I had to stand up—­packed in among a lot of people who were hot and tired too—­the smell so awful—­everything so ugly.

“I had to transfer.  That’s where I was when I first saw him—­standing on the corner waiting for the other car.

“Something was the matter—­it was a long time coming.  I was so tired, Katie, as I stood there waiting.  Tired of having it all going over the wire.