Norma met Chris again no later than the following afternoon. It was
twilight in Alice's room, and she and Norma were talking on into the
gloom, discussing the one or two guests who had chanced to come in for
tea, and planning the two large teas that Alice usually gave some time
late in November.
Chris came in quietly, kissed his wife, and nodded carelessly to Norma.
The girl's sudden mad heartbeats and creeping colour could subside
together unnoticed, for he apparently paid no attention to her, and
presently drifted to the piano, leaving the women free to resume their
conference.
Alice was a person of more than a surface sweetness; she loved harmony
and serenity, and there was almost no inclination to irritability or
ugliness in her nature. Her voice was always soothing and soft, and her
patience in the unravelling of other people's problems was
inexhaustible. Alice was, as all the world conceded, an angel.
But Norma had not been a member of her household for eight months
without realizing that Alice, like other household angels, did not wish
an understudy in the rôle. She did not quite enjoy the nearness of
another woman who might be all sweet and generous and peace-making, too.
That was her own sacred and peculiar right. She could gently and
persistently urge objections and find inconsistencies in any plan of
her sister or of Norma, no matter how advantageous it sounded, and she
could adhere to a plan of her own with a tenacity that, taken in
consideration with Alice's weak body and tender voice, was nothing less
than astonishing.
Norma, lessoned in a hard school, and possessing more than her share of
adaptability and common sense, had swiftly come to the conclusion that,
since it was not her part to adjust the affairs of her benefactors, she
might much more wisely constitute herself a sort of Greek chorus to
Alice's manipulations. Alice's motives were always of the highest, and
it was easy to praise them in all honesty, and if sometimes the younger
woman had mentally arrived at a conclusion long before Alice had
patiently and sweetly reached it, the little self-control was not much
to pay toward the comfort of a woman as heavily afflicted as Alice.
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."
"I told Aunt Annie and Leslie to-day that you wanted the Liggetts to
dine here that night," Norma said, suddenly. Instantly she realized that
she had made a mistake. And there was no one in the world whose light
reproof hurt her as Alice's did.
"You--you gave my invitation to Leslie?" Alice asked, quietly.
"Well--not quite that. But I told her that you had said that you meant
to ask them," Norma replied, uncomfortably.
"But, Norma, I did not ask you to mention it." Alice was even smiling,
but she seemed a little puzzled.
"I'm so sorry--if you didn't want me to!"
"It isn't that. But one feels that one----"
"What is Norma sorry about?" Chris asked, coming back to the fire.
"Norma, you're up against a terrible tribunal, here! Alice has been
known--well, even to give new hats to the people who make her angry!"
This fortunate allusion to an event now some months old entirely
restored Alice's good humour. Norma had accepted a certain almost-new
hat from Leslie just before the wedding, and Alice, burning with her
secret suspicion as to Norma's parentage, and in the first flush of her
affection for the girl, had told Norma that in her opinion Leslie should
not have offered it. It was not for Norma to take any patronage from her
cousin, Alice said to herself. But Norma's distress at having
disappointed Alice was so fresh and honest that the episode had ended
with Alice's presenting her with a stunning new hat, to wipe out the
terrible effect of her mild criticism.
"You're a virago," said Chris, seating himself near his wife. "Tell me
what you've been doing all day. Am I in for that dinner at Annie's
to-night? I wish I could stay here and gossip with you girls."
"Dearest, you'd get so stupid, tied here to me, that you wouldn't know
who was President of the United States!" Alice smiled. "Yes, I promised
you to Annie two weeks ago. To-morrow night Norma goes to Leslie, and
you and I have dinner all alone, so console yourself with that."
"_Très bien_," Christopher agreed. And as if the phrase suggested it, he
went on to test Norma's French. Norma was never self-conscious with him,
and in a few seconds he and Alice were laughing at her earnest
absurdities. When husband and wife went on into a conversation of their
own, Norma sat back idly, conscious that the atmosphere was always easy
and pleasant when Chris was at home, there were no petty tensions and no
sensitive misconstructions while Chris was talking. Sometimes with Annie
and Alice, and even with Leslie, Norma could be rapidly brought to the
state of feeling prickly all over, afraid to speak, and equally
uncomfortable in silence. But Chris always smoothed her spirit into
utter peace, and reëstablished her sense of proportion, her sense of
humour.
Neither he nor Alice noticed her when she presently went away to change
her gown for dinner, but when she came out of her room, half an hour
later, Chris was just coming up to his. Their rooms were on the same
floor--his the big front room, and hers one of the sunny small ones at
the back of the house. Norma's and that of Miss Slater, Alice's nurse,
were joined by a bathroom; Chris had his own splendid dressing-room and
bath, fitted, like his bedroom, with rugs and chests and highboys worthy
of a museum.
"Aren't you going to be late, Chris?" Norma asked, when they met at the
top of the stairs. Fresh from a bath, with her rich dark hair pushed
back in two shining wings from her smooth forehead, and her throat
rising white and soft from the frills of a black lacy gown, she was the
incarnation of youth and sweetness as she looked up at him. "Seven
o'clock!" she reminded him.
For answer he surprised her by catching her hand, and staring gravely
down at her.
"Were you angry at me, Norma?" he asked, in a quiet, businesslike voice.
"Angry?" she echoed, surprised. But her colour rose. "No, Chris. Why
should I be?"
"There is no reason why you should be, of course," he answered, simply,
almost indifferently. And immediately he went by her and into his room.