"They make me tired!" she tried to tell herself, walking briskly, and filling her lungs with the sweet fresh air. It was twilight, and the north-bound tide of traffic was halting and rushing, halting and rushing, up the Avenue; now held motionless at a crossing, now flowing on in mad haste, the lumbering omnibuses passing each other, little hansoms threading the mass, and foot passengers scampering and withdrawing, and risking all sorts of passages between. The distance was luminous and blue, and lights pricked against it as against a scarf of gauze.
Oh, it was sickening—it was sickening—to think that life was so grim and hard for the thousands, and so unnecessarily, so superlatively beautiful for the few! What had Mary Bishop and Katrina ever done, that they should travel in private cars, fling aside furs that had cost as much as many a man's yearly salary, chatter of the plantation near the beach at Hawaii, or of reaching Saint James's for the January Drawing-Room!
Norma stopped to give twenty-five cents to an old Italian organ grinder, and worked him into her theme as she went on. Why should he look so grateful for her casual charity, he, seventy years old, Katrina and Mary averaging less than twenty!
She reached Aunt Kate's flat in a thorough temper, angry, headachy, almost feverish after the rich scones and the rich tea, and the even less wholesome talk. The apartment house seemed, as indeed it was, grimy and odorous almost to squalor, and Aunt Kate almost hateful in her cheerfulness and energy. This was Wednesday, and on Wednesday evenings she was always happy, for then Wolf and Norma came to dinner with her. To-night, busily manipulating pans and pots, she told Norma that she had rented the two extra bedrooms of the apartment to three young trained nurses, ideal tenants in every way.
"They'll get their breakfasts here, and—if I'm away—there's no reason why they shouldn't cook themselves a little dinner now and then," said Aunt Kate, in her rich, motherly voice. "They were tickled to death to get the two rooms for twenty dollars, and that makes my own rent only seventeen more. I asked them if that was too much, and they said, no, they'd expected to pay at least ten apiece."
Norma listened, unsympathetic and gloomy. It was all so petty and so poor—trained nurses, and apple pie, and Aunt Kate renting rooms, and Wolf eager to be promoted to factory manager.
She wanted to go back—back to the life in which Annie really noticed her, gave her luncheons, included her. She wanted to count for something with Mary and Katrina and Leslie; she wanted to talk to Chris about his possible ambassadorship; she wanted them all to agree that Norma's wit and charm more than made up for Norma's lack of fortune. While she brushed her hair, in the room that would shortly accommodate two of the three little nurses, she indulged in an unsatisfying dream in which she went to London with Alice—and that autocratic little Lady Donnyfare.
Lady Donnyfare! She would be "your ladyship!" Nineteen years old, and welcomed to the ancestral mansion as her little ladyship!
Norma set the dinner table for three, with jerks and slams that slightly relieved her boiling heart. She got the napkins from the sideboard drawer, and reached for the hand-painted china sugar bowl that was part of a set that Aunt Kate had won at a fair. She set the blue tile that she had given Aunt Kate on a long-ago Christmas where the brown Rebecca teapot would stand, and cut a square slice of butter from the end of the new pound for the blue glass dish. And all the time her heart was bursting with grief and discontent, and she was beginning to realize for the first time the irrevocable quality of the step she had taken, and just how completely it had shut her off from the life for which she thirsted.
Wolf came in, hungry, dirty, radiantly happy, with a quick kiss for his mother and an embrace for his wife into which her slender figure and cloudy brown head almost disappeared. Lord, he was starving; and Lord, he was dead; and Lord, it was good to get home, said Wolf, his satisfaction with life too great to leave room for any suspicion of his wife's entire sympathy.