Was this human nature when one understood it? Was this what the world was like if one were out in it? Wasn't there anybody sincere or kind or disinterested? She asked herself these questions despairingly as she untied her horse and swung slowly into the saddle. "Poverty makes most people sordid, selfish, cowardly." She fancied she heard Mormon Joe saying it, and herself expressing her disbelief in the statement. "There are few persons strong enough to stand the gaff of public opinion." She had contradicted him, she remembered. She recalled--word for word, almost--a philosophical dissertation apropos of Prouty as he sat on the wagon tongue one evening smoking his pipe in the moonlight. "People who live without change in a small community grow to attach an exaggerated importance to the opinions of others. They come to live and breathe with a view to what their neighbors think of them. When life resolves itself into a struggle for a bare existence, it makes for cowardice and selfishness. In time the strongest characters deteriorate with inferior associates and only small interests to occupy their minds. Wills weaken, standards lower unconsciously, ideals grow misty or vanish. Youth, enthusiasm, hope, die together. Ambition turns to bitterness or stolid resignation. Suspicion, meanness, cruelty, are the natural offspring of small intelligences and narrow environment--and they flourish in a town like Prouty." "I don't believe it!" she had cried, shocked by his cynicism. He had shrugged a shoulder and replied solemnly: "I hope to God you'll never know how true it is, Katie. I hope no combination of circumstances will ever place you at their mercy. It is to make any such condition impossible that I am bending all my energies to get on my feet again." In this moment it seemed to Kate that his cynicism had the sweetness of honey compared to her own bitterness. Since the murder, curiosity had changed to unfriendliness, and unfriendliness in some instances to actual hostility. Her slightest advance was met by a barrier of coldness that froze her, and she quickly had come to wince under each fresh evidence of enmity as from a blow in the face. Thoughts of Mrs. Toomey's friendship and the belief that this antagonism was only temporary and would disappear when the local authorities had brought out the truth concerning the murder, had sustained and comforted her. The last time she had questioned Lingle, the deputy had told her with much elation in his manner that "the trail was getting warmer." Now, crushed, heartsick, staggering fairly under the brutal blow that Mrs. Toomey's weak hand had dealt her, it was an ordeal to ride back to Main Street and run the gauntlet.