And as though she must come back where she felt acquainted with herself,
she suddenly began to whistle. Katie found whistling a convenient and
pleasant recepticle for excess emotion. She had enjoyed it when a little
girl because she had been told it was unladylike; kept it up to find out
if it were really true that it would spoil her mouth, and now liked doing
it because she could do it so successfully.

She was still whistling herself back to familiar things as she ran
lightly up the stairs; had warmed to a long final trill as she stood in
the doorway. The girl looked up in amazement. She had been sitting there,
elbows on her knees, face in her hands. It was hard to see what might
have been seen in her face because at that moment the chief thing seen
was astonishment. Katie slipped down among the pillows of the couch, an
arm curled about her head. "Didn't know I could do that, did you?" she
laughed. "Oh yes, I have several accomplishments. Whistling is perhaps
the chiefest thereof. Then next I think would come golf. My game's not
bad. Then there are a few wizardy things I do with a chafing dish, and
lastly, and after all lastly should be firstly, is my genius for getting
everything and everybody into a most hopeless mess."

The girl moved impatiently at first, as if determined not to be evaded by
that light mood, but sight of Katie, lying there so much as a child would
lie, seemed to suggest how truly Katie might have spoken and she was
betrayed into the shadow of a smile.

"I suppose there has never been a human being as gifted in balling things
up as I am," meditatively boasted Kate.

"Now here you are," she continued plaintively. "You want to go away.
Well, of course, that's your affair. Why should you have to stay here--if