Then what?
First, bitter reproaches for Katie. She would be painted as having violated all the canons.
For the first time, watching her friend's face softened by his dreams, seeing him as his mother's son, she questioned her right to violate them. She did not know why she had not thought more about it before. It had seemed such a joke on the people in the enclosure. But it was not going to be a joke to hurt them. Was that what came of violating the canons? Was the hurt to one's friends the punishment one got for it?
"You can't cauterize the wounds with the story of the dog's hard life," Wayne had said of poor little unpetted—and because unpetted, unpettable—Pet.
Was Watts the real philosopher when he said "things was as they was"?
She was bewildered. She was in a country where she could not find her way. She needed a guide. Her throat grew tight, her eyes hot, at thought of how badly she needed her guide.
Then, perhaps in self-defense, she saw her friend Captain Prescott, not as a victim of the violation of canons, but as a violator of them himself. She turned from Ann's past to his.
"Harry," she asked, in rather metallic voice, "how about that affair of yours down in Cuba?"
He flushed with surprise and resentment. "I must say, Katie," he said stiffly, "I don't see what it has to do with this."
"Why, I should think it might have something to do with it. Isn't there a popular notion that our pasts have something to do with our futures?"