Norma was entirely familiar with this phase of city life, for, except for Sundays at Coney Island, or picnicking on some beach or in some meadow or wood of Connecticut, she and the Sheridans had weathered two successive hot seasons very comfortably within two hundred yards of Broadway. It held no particular horrors for her; she reflected that in another hour or two the sun would quite have died away, and then every flight of old brownstone steps would hold its chatting group, and every street its scores of screaming and running children.
Wherever her thoughts carried her, they began and ended with Christopher. He had never kissed her again after the night of his return from Miami; he had hardly touched even her hand, and he had said no word of love. But, as the summer progressed, these two had grown steadily to live more and more for each other, for just the casual friendly looks and words of ordinary intercourse in the presence of other persons, and for the chance hours that Fate now and then permitted them alone.
Norma, in every other relationship grown more whimsical and more restless, showing new phases of frivolity and shallowness to the world, had deepened and developed, under Chris's eyes, into her own highest possibility of womanhood. To him she was earnest, honest, only anxious to be good and to be true. He knew the viewpoint of that wiser self that was the real Norma; he knew how wide open those blue eyes were to what was false and worthless in the world around her.
And Norma had seen him change, too, or perhaps more truly become himself. Still apparently the old Chris, handsome, poised, cynical, and only too ready to be bored, he went his usual course of golf and polo, gave his men's dinners, kissed Alice good-bye and departed for yachting or motoring trips. Even Alice, shut away from reality in her own world of music and sweet airs, flowers and friendship, saw no change.
But Norma saw it. She knew that Chris was no longer ready to respond to every pretty woman's idle challenge to a flirtation; she knew that there was a Chris of high ideals, a Chris capable even of heroism, a Chris who loved simplicity, who loved even service, and who was not too spoiled and too proud to give his time as well as his money, to give himself gladly where he saw the need.
Their hours alone together were hours of enchanting discovery. Memories of the little boy that had been Chris, the little girl that had been Norma, their hopes and ambitions and joys and sorrows, all were exchanged. And to them both every word seemed of thrilling and absorbing interest. To Norma life now was a different thing when Chris merely was in the room, however distant from her, however apparently interested in someone, or something, else. She knew that he was conscious of her, thinking of her, and that presently she would have just the passing word, or smile, or even quiet glance that would buoy her hungry soul like a fresh and powerful current.
It was not strange to her that she should have come to feel him the most vital and most admirable of all the persons about her, for many of the men and women who loved Chris shared this view. Norma had not been in the Melrose house a month before she had heard him called "wonderful", "inimitable", "the only Chris", a hundred times. Even, she told herself sometimes, even the women that Chris quite openly disliked would not return coldness for coldness. And how much less could she, so much younger, resist the generous friendship he offered to her ignorance, and awkwardness, and strangeness?
That he saw in her own companionship something to value she had at first been slow to believe. Sheer pride had driven her to reluctance, to shyness, to unbelief. But that was long ago, months ago. Norma knew now that he truly liked her, that the very freshness and unconventionality of her viewpoint delighted him, and that he gave her a frankness, a simpleness, and an ardour, in his confidences, that would have astonished Alice herself.
Alice! Norma was thinking of Alice, now. Just where did Alice come in? Alice had always been the most generous of wives. But she could not be generous here; no human woman could. She liked Norma, in a sense she needed Norma, but Chris was all her world.
"But, good heavens!" Norma mused, as she walked slowly along, "isn't there to be any friendship for a man but his men friends, or any for a woman except unmarried men? Isn't there friendship at all between the sexes? Must it always be sneaking and subterfuge, unless it's marriage? I don't want to marry Chris Liggett——"