But there was another watcher who had shared, unseen, all this last half-hour, and who stood immovable to the last second, until the iron gates had actually clashed shut. It was a well-built, keen-eyed man, in an irreproachably fitting fur-collared overcoat, who finally turned away, fitting his eyeglasses, on their black ribbon, firmly upon the bridge of his nose, and sighing just a little as he went back to the sidewalk, and climbed into a waiting roadster.
Even after he took his seat at the wheel, he made no effort to start the car, but sat slowly drawing on his heavy gloves, and staring abstractedly at the dull, uninteresting stretch of street before him, where a dismal spring wind was stirring chaff and papers about the subway entrance, and surface cars were grinding and ringing on the curve.
It looked dull and empty—dull and empty, he thought. She had been very happy, looking up at her man, kissing her people good-bye. She was a remarkable woman, Norma.
"A remarkable woman—Norma," he said, half-aloud. "She will make him a wonderful wife; she will help him to go a long way. And she never would have had patience for formal living; it wasn't in her!"
But he remembered what was in her, what eager gaiety, what hunger for new impressions, what courage in seizing her dilemmas the instant she saw them. He remembered the flash of her eyes, and the curve of her proud little mouth.
"Theodore had more charm than any of them," he said, "and she is like him. Well—perhaps I'll meet somebody like her, some day, and the story will have a different ending!"
But he knew in his heart that there was nobody like her, and that she had gone out of his life for ever.
They had hung the belted brown coat over the big new gray one in the drawing-room, and Norma had brushed her hair, and Wolf had shoved the suit-cases under the seats, and they had gone straight into the dining-car, and were at a lighted little shining table by this time. Wolf had had no lunch; Norma was, she said, starving. They ordered their meal just as the train drew out of the underground arcades and swept over the city, in the twilight of the dull, sunless day.
Norma looked down, and joy and a vague heartache struggled within her. The little city blocks, draped with their frail tangles of fire-escapes, were as clean-cut as toys. In the streets children were screaming and racing, at the doorways women loitered and talked. Great trucks lumbered in and out among surging pedestrians, and women and children stood before the green-grocers' displays of oranges and cabbages, and trickled in and out of the markets, where cheap cuts were advertised in great chalk signs on the windows. Red brick, yellow brick, gray cement, the streets fled by; the dear, familiar streets that she and Wolf, and she and Rose, had tramped and explored, in the burning dry heat of July, in the flutter of November's first snows.