Still the girl just drifted, her eyes now revealing a certain
half-amused, half-affectionate tenderness for the tide which would bear
her so craftily.

"And speaking of honor, moves me to my usual truth-telling blunder, and I
can't resist telling you that in one respect I really have designs on
you. But be at peace--it has nothing to do with your soul. Never having
so much as discovered my own soul, I should scarcely presume to undertake
the management of yours, but what I do want to do is to feed you eggs!

"No--now don't take it that way. You're thinking of eggs one orders at a
hotel, or--or a boarding-house, maybe. But did you ever eat the eggs
that were triumphantly announced by the darlingest bantam--?"

She paused--beaten back by the things gathering in the girl's face.

"Tell me the truth!" it broke. "What are you doing this for? What have
you to _gain_ by it?"

"I hadn't thought just what I had to--gain by it," Katie stammered, at a
loss before so fierce an intensity. "Does--must one always 'gain'
something?"

"If you knew the world," the girl threw out at her, "you'd know well
enough one always expects to gain something! But you don't know the
world--that's plain."

Katie was humbly silent. She had thought she knew the world. She had
lived in the Philippines and Japan and all over Europe and America. She
would have said that the difference between her and this other girl was