"But you would be glad, Mother! You do think that she might have me?" poor Wolf said, eagerly and humbly. He was amazed to see tears brimming his mother's eyes as she nodded and turned away.
Before either spoke again a rush in the hall announced the home-coming girls, who entered the kitchen gasping and laughing with the cold.
"Whew!" panted Norma, catching Wolf's hands in her own half-frozen ones. "I'm dying! Oh, Wolf, feel my nose!" She pressed it against his forehead. "Oh, there's a wind like a knife—and look at my shoe—in I went, right through the ice! Oh, Aunt Kate, let me stay here!" and locking both slender arms about the older woman's neck, she dropped her dark, shining head upon her breast like a storm-blown bird. "It's four below zero in Broadway this minute," she added, looking sidewise under her curling lashes at Wolf.
"Who said so?" Wolf demanded.
"The man I bought that paper from said so; go back and ask him. Oh, joy, that looks good!" said Norma, eyeing the pudding that was now being drawn, crackling, bubbling, and crisp, from the oven. "Rose and I fell over the new lineoleum in the hall; I thought it was a dead body!" she went on, cheerfully. "I came down on my family feature with such a noise that I thought the woman downstairs would be rattling the dumb-waiter ropes again long before this!" She stepped to the dumb-waiter, and put her head into the shaft. "What is it, darling?" she called.
"Norma, behave yourself. It would serve you good and right if she heard you," Mrs. Sheridan said, in a panic. "Go change your shoes, and come and eat your dinner. I believe," her aunt added, pausing near her, "that you did skin your nose in the hall."
"Oh, heavens!" Norma exclaimed, bringing her face close to the dark window, as to a mirror. "Oh, say it will be gone by Friday! Because on Friday I'm going to have tea with Mrs. Liggett—her husband came in to-day and asked me. Oh, the darling! He certainly is the—well, the most—well, I don't know!——His voice, and the quiet, quiet way——"
"Oh, for pity's sake go change your shoes!" Rose interrupted. "You are the biggest idiot! I went into the store to get her," Rose explained, "and I've had all this once, in the subway. How Mr. Liggett picks up his glasses, on their ribbon, to read the titles of books——"
"Oh, you shut up!" Norma called, departing. And unashamed, when dinner was finished, and the table cleared, she produced a pack of cards and said that she was going to play The Idle Year.
"... and if I get it, it'll mean that the man I marry is going to look exactly like Chris Liggett."