"I know," Norma resumed, hammering her thought out slowly, and frowning down at the teaspoon that she was measuring between her finger-tips, "I know that there are two women in me. One is the Melrose, who could—for I know I could!—push her husband out of sight, take up the whole business of doing things correctly, from hair-dressing and writing notes of condolence to being"—she could manage a hint of a smile under swiftly raised lashes—"being presented at Saint James's!" she said. "In five years she would be an admired and correct and popular woman, and perhaps even married to this man I speak of! The other woman is my little plain French mother's sort—who was a servant—my Aunt Kate's kind," and Norma suddenly felt the tears in her eyes, and winked them away with an April smile, "who belongs to her husband, who likes to cook and tramp about in the woods, and send Christmas boxes to Rose's babies, and—and go to movies, and picnics! And that's the sort of woman I am, Chris," Norma ended, with a sudden firmness, and even a certain relief in her voice. "I've just discovered it! I've been spoiled all my life—I've been loved too much, I think, but I've thought it all out—it really came to me, as I stood beside Aunt Marianna's grave to-day, and you don't know how happy it's made me!"
"You are talking very recklessly, Norma," Chris said, as she paused, in his quiet, definite voice. "You are over-excited now. There is no such difference in the two—the two classes, to call them that, as you fancy! The richer people, the people who, as you say, do things correctly, and are presented at Saint James's, have all the simple pleasures, too. One likes moving pictures now and then; I'm sure we often have picnics in the summer. But there are women in New York—hundreds of them, who would give the last twenty years of their lives to step into exactly what you can take for the asking now. You will have Annie and me back of you—this isn't the time, Norma, for me to say just how entirely you will have my championship! But surely you know——"
He was just what he had always been: self-possessed, finished, splendidly sure in voice and manner. He was rich, he was popular, he was a dictator in his quiet way. And she knew even if the shock of his wife's sudden going had pushed his thought of her into the background, that in a few months he would be hovering about her again, conventionally freed for conventional devotion.
She saw all this, and for the first time to-day she saw other things, too. That he was forty, and looked it. That there was just the faintest suggestion of thinning in his smooth hair, where Wolf's magnificent mane was the thickest. That it was just a little bloodless, this decorous mourning that had so instantly engulfed him, who had actually told her, another man's wife, a few weeks before, that his own wife was dying, and so would free him for the woman he loved at last!
In short, Norma mused, watching him as he fell into moody silence, he had not scrupled to break the spirit of his bond to Alice, he had not hesitated to tell Norma that he loved her when only Norma, and possibly Alice, might suffer from his disloyalty. But when the sacred letter was touched, the sacred outside of the vessel that must be kept clean before the world, then Chris was instantly the impeccable, the irreproachable man of his caste again. It was all part of the superficial smallness of that world where arbitrary form ruled, where to send a wedding invitation printed and not engraved, or to mispronounce the name of a visiting Italian tenor or Russian dancer, would mark the noblest woman in the world as hopelessly "not belonging."
"One of the things you do that really you oughtn't to, Norma," he resumed, presently, in quiet distaste, "is assume that there is some mysterious difference between, say, the Craigies, and well—your husband. The Craigies are enormously wealthy, of course. That means that they have always had fine service, music, travel, the best of everything in educational ways, friendship with the best people—and those things are an advantage, generation after generation. It's absurd to deny that Annie's children, for example, haven't any real and tremendous advantages over—well, some child of a perfectly respectable family that manages nicely on ten thousand a year. But that Annie's pleasures are not as real, or that there must necessarily be something dangerous—something detestable—in the life of the best people, is ridiculous!"
"That's just what I do assert," she answered, bravely. "It may not be so for you, for you were born to it! But when you've lived, as I have, in a different sort of life, with people to whom meals, and the rent, and their jobs, really matter—this sort of thing doesn't seem real. You feel like bursting out laughing and saying, 'Oh, get out! What's the difference if I don't make calls, and broaden my vowels, and wear just this and that, and say just this and that!' It all seems so tame."
"Not at all," Chris said, really roused. "Take Betty Doane, now, the Craigies' cousin. There's nothing conventional about her. There's a girl who dresses like a man all summer, who ran away from school and tramped into Hungary dressed as a gipsy, who slapped Joe Brinckerhoff's face for him last winter, and who says that when she loves a man she's going off with him—no matter who he is, or whether he's married or not, or whether she is!"
"I'll tell you what she sounds like to me, Chris, a little saucy girl of about eight trying to see how naughty she can be! Why, that," said Norma, eagerly, "that's not real. That isn't like house-hunting when you know you can't pay more than thirty dollars' rent, or surprising your husband with a new thermos bottle that he didn't think he could afford!"
"Ah, well, if you like slums, of course!" Chris said, coldly. "But nothing can prevent your inheriting an enormous sum of money, Norma," he said, ending the conversation, "and in six months you'll feel very differently!"