Norma fled after the coat, dodging and slipping through every opening, and keeping the rapidly moving slouch hat before her. She was quite out of breath when she came abreast of the man, and saw, with a sickening revulsion, that it was not Wolf.
What the man thought Norma never knew or cared. The surprising blankness of the disappointment made her almost dizzy; she turned aside blindly, and stumbled into the quiet backwater behind a stairway, where she could recover her self-possession and endure unobserved the first pangs of bitterness. It seemed to her that she would die if she could not see Wolf, if she had to endure another minute of loneliness and darkness and aimless wandering through the night.
Rose's house was only three well-lighted blocks from the station; Norma almost ran them. Other houses, she noted, were still brightly lighted at quarter to eleven o'clock, and Rose's might be. Aunt Kate was there, and she and Rose might well be sitting up, with the restless smaller baby, or to finish some bit of sewing.
It was a double house, and the windows that matched Rose's bedroom and dining-room were lighted in the wrong half. But all Rose's side was black and dark and silent.
Norma, for the first time in her life, needed courage for the knocking and ringing and explaining. If they would surely be kind to her, she might chance it, she thought. But if Aunt Kate was angry with her vacillations in regard to Wolf, and if Rose had also taken Wolf's side, then she knew that she, Norma, would begin to cry, and disgrace herself, and have good-natured simple old Harry poking about and wondering what was the matter——
No, she didn't dare risk it. So she waited in the little garden, looking up at the windows, praying that little Harry would wake up, or that the baby's little acid wail would drift through the open window, and then the dim light bloom suddenly, and show a silhouette of Rose, tall and sweet in her wrapper, with a great rope of braid falling over one shoulder.
But moments went by, and there was no sound. Norma went to the street lamp a hundred feet away and looked at her wrist watch. Quarter past eleven; it was useless to wait any longer; it had been a senseless quest from the beginning.
She went back to the city by train and boat, crying desolately in the darkness above the ploughing of the invisible waters. She cried with pity for herself, for it seemed to her that life was very unfair to her.
"Is it my fault that I inherit all that money?" she asked the dark night angrily. "Is it my fault that I love Chris Liggett? Isn't it better to be honest about it than live with a man I don't love? Isn't that the worst thing that woman can endure—a loveless marriage?
"But that's just the High School Debating Society!" she interrupted herself, suddenly, using a phrase that she and Wolf had coined long ago for glib argument that is untouched by actual knowledge of life. "Loveless marriage—and wife in name only! I wonder if I am getting to be one of the women who throw those terms about as an excuse for just sheer selfishness and stupidity!"