After a block of perplexed thinking she knew who that woman was; it flashed from her memory where she had known that intent look, that wistful intentness lighting a thin little face. It was Annie Morris, a girl in her class at the high-school, a plain, quiet girl--poor she believed she was, not in Ruth's crowd. Now that she searched back for what she remembered about it she believed that this Annie Morris had always liked her; and perhaps she had taken more notice of her than Edith and the other girls had. She could see her now getting out of the shabby buggy in which she drove in to school--she lived somewhere out in the country. She remembered talking to her sometimes at recess--partly because she seemed a good deal alone and partly because she liked to talk to her. She remembered that she was what they called awfully bright in her classes. That this girl, whom she had forgotten, should welcome her so warmly stirred an old wondering: a wondering if somewhere in the world there were not people who would be her friends. That wondering, longing, had run through many lonely days. The people she had known would no longer be her friends. But were there not other people? She knew so little about the world outside her own life; her own life had seemed to shut down around her. But she had a feeling that surely somewhere--somewhere outside the things she had known--were people among whom she could find friends. So far she had not found them. At the first, seeing how hard it would be, how bad for them both, to have only each other, she had tried to go out to people just as if there were nothing in her life to keep her back from them. And then they would "hear"; that hearing would come in the most unforeseen little ways, at the most unexpected times; usually through those coincidences of somebody's knowing somebody else, perhaps meeting someone from a former place where they had already "heard"; it was as if the haphazardness of life, those little accidents of meetings that were without design, equipped the world with a powerful service for "hearing," which after a time made it impossible for people to feel that what was known in one place would not come to be known in another. After she had several times been hurt by the drawing away of people whom she had grown to like, she herself drew back where she could not be so easily hurt. And so it came about that her personality changed in that; from an outgoing nature she came to be one who held back, shut herself in. Even people who had never "heard" had the feeling she did not care to know them, that she wanted to be let alone. It crippled her power for friendship; it hurt her spirit. And it left her very much alone. In that loneliness she wondered if there were not those other people--people who could "hear" and not draw away. She had not found them; perhaps she had at times been near them and in her holding back--not knowing, afraid--had let them go by. Of that, too, she had