time about it that it had not yet occurred to any one to expect her to
help pay the fiddler. Just watching Katie dance would seem pay enough
for any reasonable fiddler. Katie laughed a great deal, and was smiling
most of the time; she seemed always to have things in her thoughts to
make smiles. Wayne laughed little and some of his smiles made one
understand how the cat felt about having its fur rubbed the wrong way.
Their friend Major Darrett once said: "When I meet Katie I have a fancy
she has just come from a jolly dip in the ocean; that she lay on the
sands in the sun and kicked up her heels longer than she had any
business to, and now she's flying along to keep the most enchanting
engagement she ever had in all her life. She's smiling to herself to
think how bad she was to lie in the sand so long, and she's not at all
concerned, because she knows her friends will be so happy to see her
that they'll forget to scold her for being late. Katie's spoiled," the
Major concluded, "but we like her that way."

Of Wayne this same friend remarked: "Wayne's a hard nut to crack."

Many army people felt that way. In fact, Wayne was a nut the army itself
had not quite cracked. Some army people maintained that Wayne was
disagreeable. But that may have been because he was not just like all
other army people. He did not seem to have grasped the idea that being
"army" set him apart. Sometimes he made the mistake of judging army
affairs by ordinary standards. That was when they got some idea of how
the cat felt. And of all cats an army cat would most resent having its
fur rubbed in any but the prescribed direction.

Katie, continuing her ruminations about Wayne as the product of things,
had come to see that with it all he was detached from those desirable
things which had produced him. One knew that Wayne had traditions, yet he