“ I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking how you live alone in this room, and have parties.”
Mary reflected for a second.
“ It means, chiefly, a power of being disagreeable to one’s own family, I think. I have that, perhaps. I didn’t want to live at home, and I told my father. He didn’t like it.... But then I have a sister, and you haven’t, have you?”
“ 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
