Norma felt her throat thicken.
"Chris—to England—as Ambassador?" she said.
"Well, there's just a possibility—no, there's more than that!" Annie told her. "I believe he'll take it, if it is offered. Of course, he's supremely well fitted for it. There's even"—Annie threw out to the company at large, with that air of being specially informed in which she delighted—"there's even very good reason to suppose that influence has been brought to bear by——But I don't dare go into that. However, we feel that it will be offered. And the one serious drawback is naturally my sister. Alice—poor child! And yet, of us all, Alice is most desperately eager for Chris to take it."
"I should think," Norma said, "that Aunt Alice could almost be moved——?"
"Oh, she would be!" Annie agreed, with her quick, superior definiteness. "That's the very question. Whether the north Atlantic passage, say in May, when it oughtn't to be so hard, would be too much for her. Of course it would tire her and shake her cruelly, no doubt of that. But Hendrick even talks of some sort of balanced bed—on the hammock idea—and Miss Slater would see that everything that was humanly possible was done. I believe it could be managed. Then she would be met by one of those big, comfortable English ambulances, at Southampton, and taken right to her apartment, or hotel, or whatever Chris arranges."
"Not so much harder," Norma ventured, "than the trip to Newport, after all."
"Well, she didn't go to Newport last summer," Annie said, "but she is certainly better now than she was then, and I believe it could be done; I really do. We're not talking a great deal about it, because nothing is settled, but if it becomes definite, I shall certainly advise it."
Norma drank her tea, and listened, and threw in an occasional word. When the other women rose to go, she rose, too, perhaps half-hoping that Annie would hold her for a more intimate word. But Annie quite suavely and indifferently included her in her general farewells, and Norma had cordial good-byes from the two young women, and even a vague invitation from the older Mrs. Thayer to come and see her, when Katrina was gone.
Then she was walking down the Avenue, with her head and heart in a confused whirl of bitterness and disappointment. The three quarters of an hour in Aunt Annie's big, dim, luxurious palace had been like a dose of some insidious poison.
The very atmosphere of richness and service and idleness, the beauty of wide spaces and rich tones, the massed blossoms and dimmed lights, struck sharply upon senses attuned to Aunt Kate's quick voice, Rose's little house with its poverty and utility, and Wolf's frank enjoyment of his late and simple dinner. The conversation, with its pleasant assumption of untold wealth of power and travel and regal luxuriousness, burned its memory across Norma's mind like a corroding acid. They were not contemptible, they were not robbers or brutes or hideous old plutocrats who had grown wealthy upon the wrongs of the poor. No, they were normal pleasant girls whose code it was to be generous to maids and underlings, to speak well of their neighbours, to pay their bills and keep their promises.