If Norma had drifted cheerfully and recklessly into this situation, she paid for it now, when petty restrictions and conventions stung her like so many bees, and when she could turn nowhere for relief from constant heartache and the sickening monotony of her thoughts. She could not have Chris; she could not give him up. Hours with him were only a degree more bearable than hours without him.
When he spoke hopefully of a possible change, of "something" making their happiness possible, she would turn on him like a little virago. Yet if he despaired, tears would come to Norma's eyes, and she would beg him almost angrily to change his tone, or she would disgrace them both by beginning to cry.
Norma grew thin and fidgety, able to concentrate her mind on nothing, and openly indifferent to the society she had courted so enthusiastically a year ago. It was a part of her suffering that she grew actually to dislike Alice, always so suave and cheerful, always so serenely sure of Chris's devotion. What right had this woman, who had been rich and spoiled and guarded all her life, to hold him away from the woman he loved? Chris had been chained to this couch for years, reading, playing his piano, infinitely solicitous and sympathetic. But was he to spend all his life thus? Was there to be no glorious companionship, no adventure, no deep and satisfying love for Chris, ever in this world? Norma wished no ill to Alice, but she hated a world that could hold Alice's claim legitimate.
"Why should it be so?" she said to Chris one day, bitterly. "Why, when all my life was going so happily, did I have to fall in love with you, I wonder? It could so easily have been somebody else!"
"I don't know!" Chris answered, soberly, flinging away his half-finished cigarette, and folding his arms over his chest, as he stared through a screen of bare trees at the river. It was a March day of warm airs and bursting buds; the roads were running water, and every bank and meadow oozed the thawing streams, but there was no green yet. Chris had come for the girl at three o'clock, just as she was starting out for one of her aimless, unhappy tramps, and had carried her off for a twenty-five-mile run to the quiet corner of the tavern's porch in Tarrytown where they were having tea. "I suppose that's just life. Things go so rottenly, sometimes!"
Norma's eyes watered as she pushed the untasted toast away from her, cupped her chin in her hands, and stared at the river in her turn.
"Chris, if I could go back, I think I'd never speak to you!" she said, wretchedly.
"You mustn't say that," he reproached her. "My darling; surely it's brought you some happiness?"
"I suppose so," Norma conceded, lifelessly, after a silence. "But I can't go on!" she protested, suddenly. "I can't keep this up! I suppose I've done something very wicked, to be punished this way. But, Chris, I loved you from the very first day I ever saw you, in Biretta's Bookstore, I think. I can't sleep," she stammered, piteously, "and I am so afraid all the time!"
"Afraid of what?" the man asked, very low.