CHAPTER XI
Norma had indeed chanced to make one girl friend, and one of whom Leslie and Alice, and even Annie, heartily approved. Caroline, the seventeen-year-old daughter of the Peter Craigies, was not a débutante yet, but she would be the most prominent, because the richest, of them all next winter. Caroline was a heavy-lidded, slow-witted girl, whose chief companions in life had been servants, foreign-born governesses, and music-masters. Norma had been seated next to her at the international tennis tournament, and had befriended the squirming and bashful Caroline from sheer goodness of heart. They had criticized the players, and Caroline had laughed the almost hysteric, shaken laugh that so worried her mother, and had blurted confidences to Norma in her childish way.
The next day there had been an invitation for Norma to lunch with Caroline, and Mrs. von Behrens had promptly given another luncheon for both girls. Norma was pleased, for a few weeks, with her first social conquest, but after that Caroline became a dead weight upon her. She hated the flattery, the inanities, the utter dulness of the great Craigie mansion, and she began to have a restless conviction that time spent with Caroline was time lost.
The friendship had cost her dear, too. Norma hated, even months later to remember just what she had paid for it.
In August a letter from Rose had reached her at Newport, announcing Rose's approaching marriage. Harry Redding's sister Mary was engaged to a most satisfactory young man of Italian lineage, one Joe Popini, and Mrs. Redding would hereafter divide her time between the households of her daughter and her son. Harry, thus free to marry, had persuaded Rose to wait no longer; the event was to be on a Monday not quite two weeks ahead, and Norma was please, please, please to come down as soon as she could.
Norma had read this letter with a sensation of pain at her heart. She felt so far away from them nowadays; she felt almost a certain reluctance to dovetail this life of softness and perfume and amusement in upon the old life. But she would go. She would go, of course!
And then she had suddenly remembered that on the Monday before Rose's wedding, the Craigies' splendid yacht was to put to sea for a four- or five-days' cruise, and that Caroline had asked her to go—the only other young person besides the daughter of the house. And great persons were going, visiting nobility from England, a young American Crœsus and his wife, a tenor from the Metropolitan. Annie had been delighted with this invitation; even Leslie, just returned from California and Hawaii, had expressed an almost surprised satisfaction in the Craigies' friendliness.
If they got back Friday night, then Norma could go down to the city early Saturday morning, and have two days with Rose and Aunt Kate. But if the yacht did not return until Saturday—well, even then there would be time. She and Rose could get through a tremendous lot of talking in twenty-four hours. And the voyage certainly would not be prolonged over Saturday, for had not Mrs. Craigie said, in Norma's hearing, that Saturday was the very latest minute to which she could postpone the meeting for the big charity lawn party?
So Norma and the enslaved Caroline continued to plan for their sea trip, and Norma commissioned Chris to order Rose's wedding present at Gorham's.