“And you propose to marry——”
“I don't propose to do anything,” interrupted Norma, quickly. “I at least can wait till he asks me. And now, mother, I've had rather a bad time—don't you think we might stop?”
“It seems to me, my dear Norma, we are only just beginning,” said Mrs. Hardacre.
Norma rose with nervous impatience.
“O heavens, mother,” she said, in the full deep notes of her voice, which were only sounded at rare moments of feeling, “can't you see that I'm in earnest? This man is like no one else I have ever met. I have grown to need him. Do you know what that means? With him I am a changed woman—as God made me, I suppose; natural, fresh, real—” Mrs. Hardacre sat in Norma's vacated chair by the window and stared at her, as she moved about the room. “I somehow feel that I am a woman, after all. I have got something higher than myself that I can fall at the feet of, and that's what every woman craves when she's decent. As for marrying him—I'm not fit to marry him. There is n't any one living who is. That's an end of it, mother. I can't say anything more.”
“And do you propose to go on seeing this person when he recovers?” asked Mrs. Hardacre.
“Why not?”
“I really can't argue with you,” said her mother, mystified. “If you had told me this rubbish yesterday, I should have thought you touched in your wits. To-day it is midsummer madness.”
“Why to-day?” asked Norma.
“The man has shown himself to be such a horrible beast. Of course, if you think confessing to having seduced a girl under infamous circumstances and driven her by his brutality to child-murder and suicide, and blazoning the whole thing out at a fashionable garden-party and getting himself shot for his pains, are idyllic virtues, nothing more can be said. It's a case, as I remarked, for a madhouse.” Norma came and stood before her mother, her brows knitted in perplexity.