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