"Did you want to take the next trolley to Burbank?"
"Yes," she answered, wondering why her eyes were so heavy, her head so dull.
"Well, it'll be along in five minutes, now. I thought you wanted to take the last one, but you didn't stir, and come to find out, you were asleep. I hated to rouse you now, only I thought, maybe, I'd ought to."
She had slept two hours.
Speeding through the country, her head became clearer. Not for that were her thoughts less harassing. Another element had entered in, to make them more so,—indecision. Little by little, bit by bit, came back certain stray fragments of sentences she dimly recollected having heard Mrs. Slawson pronounce. Sentences that, at the time, in her benumbed state, had left her cold, making no conscious impression. She remembered Martha's face, when first she saw her at the porch door. What had she been afraid of? Martha Slawson, who was never afraid of anything? The answer that had sprung to her own lips, was given without deliberation. It had just naturally come in response to Mrs. Slawson's look of dread. She had replied that her grandmother was "all right." How had she known her grandmother was all right? She had not stopped to inform herself, before she left the house. She had gone without a word, without a look.
The last time she and her grandmother had come to grief, trying to "understand each other," the old woman had borne a brave front until the ordeal was over, then had quietly fainted away. What if she had done the same thing now?—when no one was there to come to the rescue.
* * * * *
—"By your own say-so you ain't any of those things.—You got a mind o' your own an' a conscience o' your own.... You're strong as they make'm.... This hangin' on your antsisters, for good or for bad, makes me sick.... Don't you fool yourself: It's every man for himself, these days, thank God! ... Somethin' beautiful in all your blows, if you only had sense to see. The hardest knock you ever got, you'd see stars...."
* * * * *
Once, when she was a child, Katherine had been given a toy which, more than all of her others, had filled her with delight and wonderment.