Mrs. von Behrens had been a trifle distant with the newcomer in the family until now, but the day before the cruise began she extended just a little of her royal graciousness toward Norma. Like Leslie, Norma admired her Aunt Annie enormously, and hungered for her most casual word.
"You've plenty of frocks, Kiddie?" asked Annie. "One uses them up at the rate of about three a day!"
"Oh!"—Norma widened her innocent eyes—"I've a wardrobe trunk full of them: white skirts and white shoes and hats!"
"Well, I didn't suppose you had them tied in a handkerchief!" Annie had responded, with her quiet smile. "See if that fits you!"
They had been up in Mrs. von Behrens's big bedroom, where that lady was looking at a newly arrived box of gowns. "That" was the frail, embroidered coat of what Norma thought the prettiest linen suit she had ever seen.
"It's charming on you, you little slender thing," Annie had said. "The skirt will be too long; will you pin it, Keating? And see that it goes at once to my mother's house."
Keating had pinned, admired. And Norma, turning herself before the mirror, with her eyes shy with pleasure and gratitude, had known that she was gaining ground.
So they had started radiantly on the cruise. But after the first few miraculous hours of gliding along beneath the gay awnings that had all been almost astonishingly disappointing, too. Caroline, to begin with, was a dreadful weight upon her young guest. Caroline for breakfast, luncheon, and dinner; Caroline retiring and rising, became almost hateful. Caroline always wanted to do something, when Norma could have dreamed and idled in her deck chair by the hour. It must be deck golf or deck tennis, or they must go up and tease dignified and courteous Captain Burns, "because he was such an old duck," or they must harass one or two of the older people into bridge. Norma did not play bridge well, and she hated it, and hated Caroline's way of paying for her losses almost more than paying them herself.
Norma could not lie lazily with her book, raising her eyes to the exquisite beauty of the slowly tipping sea, revelling in coolness and airiness, because Caroline, fussing beside her, had never read a book through in her life. The guest did not know, even now, that Caroline had been a mental problem for years, that Caroline's family had consulted great psycho-analysts about her, and had watched the girl's self-centredness, her odd slyness, her hysteric emotions, with deep concern. She did not know, even now, that the Cragies were anxious to encourage this first reaching out, in Caroline, toward a member of her own sex, and that her fancies for members of the opposite sex—for severely indifferent teachers, for shocked and unresponsive chauffeurs—were among the family problems, a part of the girl's unfortunate under-development. Caroline's family was innocently surprised to realize that her mind had not developed under the care of maids who were absorbed in their own affairs, and foreigners who would not have been free to attend her had they not been impecunious and unsuccessful in more lucrative ways. They had left her to Mademoiselles and Fräuleins quite complacently, but they did not wish her to be like these too-sullen or too-vivacious ladies.
So they welcomed her friendship with Norma, and Caroline's passionate desire to be with her friend was not to find any opposition on the part of her own family. Little Miss Sheridan had an occasional kindly word from Caroline's mother, a stout woman, middle-aged at thirty-five, and good-natured smiles from Caroline's father, a well-groomed young man. And socially, this meant that the Melroses' young protégée was made.