United States or Iraq ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
When his eyes cleared he saw Norma Berwynd struggling with her husband, interposing her own slender body in his path. Francis was cursing her foully for her unfaithfulness; his voice was thick and brutal. "Yes! It's true!" she cried, with hysterical defiance. "I never knew till now; but it's true! It's true!" "You've killed him!"
She laughed secretly whenever she recalled the solemn undertaker who had solicited her own aid in filling out a blank. His first melancholy question, "And thud dame of the father " Norma had momentarily supposed to be the beginning of a prayer, and it had been with an almost hysterical revulsion of feeling that she had said: "Oh, her father's name? Oh, Francis Dabney Murison."
If Aunt Alice liked Norma to come in and talk books and write notes, if Chris chose to be gallant, if Grandma lavished an unusual affection upon this new protégée, well, it robbed Leslie of nothing, after all. But with Norma it was different.
"Who would marry me?" she said, under her breath, with a scornful look, under half-lowered lids, into space. For answer he gave her an odd glance one that lived in her memory for many and many a day. "Ah, Norma Norma Norma!" he said quickly, half laughingly. Then his expression changed, and his smile died away. "I have something to bear," he said, with a glance upward toward Alice's windows.
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.
Rushing to another extreme of unreason, she decided that she and Wolf must go see Rose to-night and perhaps the Barrys, too and cheer and solace them all. And Norma indulged in a little dream of herself nursing and cooking in the Barrys' six little cluttered rooms, and earning golden opinions from all the group.
And so fussing and changing and criticizing, Annie went away, and Norma followed her up to her bedroom. "I'm wondering when we're going to give you an engagement luncheon, Norma," said the hostess, in a whirl of rapid dressing. "Who's ahead now?" "Oh nobody!" Norma answered, with a mirthless laugh. She had been listless and pale for several days, and did not seem herself at all.
They were going to Atlantic City; neither had ever been there, and if this warm weather lasted it would be lovely, even in early spring. It was almost four o'clock when the younger women went upstairs for the freshening touches that Norma declared she needed, and then Wolf and his mother were left alone.
"I remember her Theodore's wife," Chris said, eager to help her. "And she was this girl's mother," Mrs. Melrose added, clasping Norma's fingers. "You understand that, Chris?" "Yes, darling we understand!" Norma said, with a nod to Chris that he was to humour her. But Chris looked only strangely troubled.
Ruin is a light thing to talk about, I have read of ruin in the papers, until it has become a matter of course; I begin to know what it means." It was a changeful, terrible beauty that beamed on her face. She looked like an inspired priestess before the altar, then like Norma in her despair, then like the maddened Medea in Rachel's thrilling impersonation.
Word Of The Day