Well, her heart would flutter, she could not stop it or ignore it. Norma found no answer ready, and though she lifted her cup to her lips, to hide her confusion, she could not taste it. The strangeness of Chris's sudden departure was no mystery to her; he had been shocked and stunned by her marriage, and he had run away from the eyes that might have pierced his discomfiture.
Still, her hands were trembling, and she felt oddly shaken and confused. Leslie carried the conversation away to safer fields, and shortly afterward Norma could say her good-byes. Everybody, Leslie said, walking with her to the corner, wanted to know what the bride wanted for a wedding-present. Norma told Wolf, over their candle-lighted supper table, an hour or two later, that he and she would be bankrupted for life returning them.
Yet she loved the excitement of receiving the gifts; naturally enough, loved Rose's ecstasies over the rugs and silver and mahogany that made the little New Jersey house a jewel among its kind. It was what Norma had unhesitatingly pronounced an "adorable" house, a copy of the true colonial green-and-white, quaint and prim enough to please even Leslie, when Leslie duly came to call. It stood at the end of a tree-shaded street, with the rising woods behind it, and Norma recklessly invested in brick walks and a latticed green fence, hydrangeas in wooden tubs and sunflowers and hollyhocks, until her stretch of side garden looked like a picture by Kate Greenaway.
When it was all done, midsummer was upon them, but she and Wolf thought that there had never been anything so complete and so charming in all the world. The striped awnings that threw clean shadows upon the clipped grass; the tea table under the blue-green leaves of an old apple tree; the glass doors that opened upon orderly, white-wainscoted rooms full of shining dark surfaces and flowered chintzes and gleaming glass bowls of real flowers; the smallness and completeness and prettiness of everything filled them both with utter satisfaction.
Norma played at housekeeping like a little girl in a doll's house. She had a rosy little Finnish maid who enjoyed it all almost as much as she did, and their adventures in hospitality were a constant amusement and delight. On Saturdays, when Rose and Harry and Aunt Kate usually arrived, Wolf could hardly believe that all this ideal beauty and pleasure was his to share.
The girls would pose and photograph the baby tirelessly, laughing as he toppled and protested, and kissing the fat legs that showed between his pink romper and his pink socks. They would pack picnic lunches, rushing to and fro breathlessly with thermos bottles and extra wraps for Miggs, as Harry Junior was usually called. Once or twice they cleaned the car, with tremendous splashing and spattering, assuming Wolf's old overalls for the operation, and retreating with shrieks into the kitchen whenever the sound of an approaching motor-car penetrated into their quiet road. Mrs. Sheridan characterized them variously as "Wild Indians", "Ay-rabs", and "poor innocents" but her heart was so filled with joy and gratitude for the turn of events that had brought all these miracles about, that no nonsense and no noise seemed to her really extravagant.
It was an exceptionally pleasant community into which the young Sheridans had chanced to move, and they might have had much more neighbourly life than they chose to take. There were about them beginners of all sorts: writers and artists and newspaper men, whose little cars, and little maids, and great ambitions would have formed a strong bond of sympathy in time. But Wolf and Norma saw them only occasionally, when a Sunday supper at the country club or a Saturday-night dance supplied them with a pleasant stimulating sense of being liked and welcomed, or when general greetings on the eight-o'clock train in the morning were mingled with comments on the thunderstorm or the epidemic of nursery chicken-pox.
When Rose and Harry were gone, on Sunday evenings, Wolf and Norma might sit on the side steps of the side porch, looking off across the gradual drop descent of tree-tops and shingled roofs, into a distant world silvering under the summer moon. These were their happiest times, when solitude and quiet spread about them, after the hospitable excitements of the day, and they could talk and dream and plan for the years ahead.
She was an older Norma now, even though marriage had not touched her with any real responsibility, and even though she was more full of delicious childish absurdities than ever. The first months of their marriage had curiously reversed their relationship, and it was Norma now who gave, and Wolf who humbly and gratefully accepted. It was Norma who poured comfort and beauty and companionship into his life, who smiled at him over his morning fruit, and who waited for him under the old maple at the turn of the road, every night. And as her wonderful and touching generosity enveloped him, and her strange wisdom and new sweetness impressed him more and more, Wolf marvelled and adored her more utterly. He had always loved her as a big brother, had even experienced a definite heartache when she grew up and went away, a lovely and unattainable girl in the place where their old giddy dear little Norma had been.
But now his passion for his young wife was becoming a devouring fire in Wolf's heart; she absorbed him and possessed him like a madness. A dozen times a day he would take from his pocket-book the thin leather case she had given him, holding on one side a photograph of the three heads of Rose, his mother, and the baby, and on the other an enchanting shadow of the loosened soft hair and the serious profile that was Norma.