CHAPTER XIII


To understand Kitty at this moment one must be able to understand
the Irish; and nobody does or can or will. Consider her twenty-four
years, her corpuscular inheritance, the love of drama and the love
of adventure. Imagine possessing sound ideas of life and the ability
to apply them, and spiritually always galloping off on some broad
highway - more often than not furnished by some engaging scoundrel
of a novelist - and you will be able to construct a half tone of
Kitty Conover.

That civilization might be actually on its deathbed, that positively
half of the world was starving and dying and going mad through the
reaction of the German blight touched her in a detached way. She
felt sorry, dreadfully sorry, for the poor things; but as she could
not help them she dismissed them from her thoughts every morning after
she had read the paper, the way most of us do here in these United
States. You cannot grapple with the misery of an unknown person
several thousand miles away.

That which had taken place during the past twenty-four hours was to
her a lark, a blindman's buff for grown-ups. It was not in her to
tremble, to shudder, to hesitate, to weigh this and to balance
that. Irish curiosity. Perhaps in the original that immortal line
read: "The Irish rush in where angels fear to tread," and some
proofreader had a particular grudge against the race.

When the elevator reached the seventeenth floor, the passengers
surged forth. All except Kitty, who tarried.