For Norma knew in her own heart that Alice was heavily afflicted, although the invalid herself always took the attitude that her helplessness brought the best part of life into her room, and shut away from her the tediousness and ugliness of the world.
"'Aïda' two weeks from to-night!" Alice said this evening, with her sympathetic smile.
"Oh, Aunt Alice—if you could go! Didn't you love it?"
"Love the opera? Do you hear her, Chris? But I didn't love people talking all about me—and they will do it, you know! And that makes one furious!"
"I see you getting furious," Norma observed, incredulously.
"You don't know me! But I was a bashful, adoring sort of little person, on my first night——"
"Yes, you were," Chris teased her, over a lazy ripple of thirds. "She was such a bashful little person at the Mardi Gras dance she promised Artie Peyton her first cotillion the following season."
"Oh, Aunt Alice—you didn't!"
Alice's rather colourless face flushed happily, and she half lowered her lids.
"Chris thinks that is a great story on me. As a matter of fact, I did do that; I was just childish enough. But I can't think how the story got out, for I was desperately ashamed of it."