was not tradition fettered; he suggested ancestors without being ancestor
conscious. Was it the gun--as Wayne the Worthy persisted in calling
it--and the gun's predecessors--for Wayne always had something--made him
so distinctly more than the mere result of things which had formed him?
"It is the gun," Katie decided, taking him in with half shut eyes as a
portrait painter might. "Had the same ancestors myself, and yet I'm both
less and more of them than he is. What I need's a gun! Then I'd stand out
of the background better, too." Then with one of Katie's queer twists of
fancy--Ann! Might not Ann be her gun? Perhaps she had been wanting a gun
for a long time without knowing what it was she was wanting when surely
wanting something. Perhaps every one felt the gun need to make them less
the product and more the person.

Then there was another thing. The thing that had traced those lines about
Wayne's mouth, and had whitened, a little, the brown hair of his temples.
Wayne had cared for Clara. Heaven only knew how he could--Katie's
thoughts ran on. Perhaps heaven did understand those things--certainly it
was too much for mere earth. Why Wayne, about whom there had always
seemed a certain brooding bigness, certainly a certain rare indifference,
should have fallen so absurdly in love with the most vain and selfish and
vapid girl that ever wrecked a post was more than Katie could make out.
And it had been her painful experience to watch Wayne's disappointment
develop, watch that happiness which had so mellowed him recede as day by
day Clara fretted and pouted and showed plainly enough that to her love
was just a convenient thing which might impel one's husband to get one a
new set of furs. She remembered so well one evening she had been in
Clara's room when Wayne came in after having been away since early
morning. So eager and tender was Wayne's face as he approached Clara, who
was looking over an advertising circular. There was a light in his eyes
which it would seem would have made Clara forget all about advertising