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Then grimly picking up child and bundle, with one guilty, frightened look about the room that for so many years had meant home to her, she went out the door and hurried cautiously down the steps and out into the snowy night. It was half-past twelve when Norma Bonkowski, returning, climbed the stairs of the Tenement wearily.
In what fool's paradise had she been drifting, she asked herself contemptuously, that she and Chris, reasonable, right-thinking man and woman, could be reduced to this fearful and wretched position, could even consider even name what their sane senses must shrink from in utter horror! Norma was but twenty-two, but she knew that there was only one end to that road.
Evidently Acton, Annie, and Leslie were alone, in Annie's room, out of sight, but not a dozen feet away from where she stood. Norma did not catch the exact words, but she caught her name, and her heart stood still with the instinctive terror of the trapped. Annie had not heard either evidently; she said "What, dear?" sympathetically.
Norma wished no ill to Alice, but she hated a world that could hold Alice's claim legitimate. "Why should it be so?" she said to Chris one day, bitterly. "Why, when all my life was going so happily, did I have to fall in love with you, I wonder? It could so easily have been somebody else!" "I don't know!"
His exquisite poise, his sureness of being absolutely correct, was one of his charms. But it was a little hard not to have the depth of his present feeling for her sweep him off his feet just occasionally. He had, indeed, shown her far more daring favour when Alice was alive meeting Norma down town, driving her about, walking with her where they might reasonably fear to be seen now and then.
Rose said, confidently. "It'll all come right. There's no reason why it shouldn't!" And with all the interest of their old days of intimacy she asked eagerly: "Nono, is he handsome?" "Oh, yes tremendously." "And the right age?" Norma laughed, half protestant. "Rose, aren't you a little demon for the third degree!"
He was quite frankly a collector, a connoisseur, a dilettante in a hundred different directions, and he had had leisure all his life to develop and perfect his affectations. In all this new world Norma could not perhaps have discovered a man more rich in just what would impress her ignorance, her newness, to the finer aspects of civilization.
Melrose, Norma, darling, that was such a good friend to me and mine years ago!" "No warmer friend than you were to me, Kate," the old lady said, quickly, still keeping an arm about the sturdy figure. "This is my granddaughter, Theodore's little girl," Mrs. Melrose added, catching Leslie with her free hand.
Chris could never be indifferent to any woman; if he did not actively dislike her, he took pains to please her, and, never actively disliking Norma, he had from the first constituted himself her guide and friend. Long before he was conscious that there was a real charm to this little chance member of their group, Norma had capitulated utterly.
The descent from "Polyeucte" to "Ruy Blas" is great, not so much in the poetry of form as in the elevation of thought; but the descent from "Ruy Blas" to the best drama now produced is out of poetry altogether, and into those flats of prose which give not even the glimpse of a mountain-top. But now to the opera. S in Norma! The house was crowded, and its enthusiasm as loud as it was genuine.
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