"No, I haven't any sisters."
"You are writing a life of your grandfather?" Mary pursued.
Katharine seemed instantly to be confronted by some familiar thought from which she wished to escape. She replied, "Yes, I am helping my mother," in such a way that Mary felt herself baffled, and put back again into the position in which she had been at the beginning of their talk. It seemed to her that Katharine possessed a curious power of drawing near and receding, which sent alternate emotions through her far more quickly than was usual, and kept her in a condition of curious alertness. Desiring to classify her, Mary bethought her of the convenient term "egoist."
"She's an egoist," she said to herself, and stored that word up to give to Ralph one day when, as it would certainly fall out, they we
