She missed Wolf. It was, as always, a curiously unsatisfying atmosphere, this of the old Melrose house. The whispers, the hushed footsteps, the lowered voices, Aunt Annie's plaintive heroism in her superb crapes, the almost belligerent loyalty of the intimate friends who praised and marvelled at her, the costly flowers--thousands of dollars' worth of them--the extra men helping Joseph to keep everything decorous and beautiful--somehow it all sickened Norma, and she wished that Wolf could come and take her for a walk, and talk to her about it. He would be interested in it all, and he would laugh at her account of the undertakers, and he would break into elementary socialism when the cost of the whole pompous pageant was estimated. And what would he think of her new-found wealth? Norma tried to imagine it, but somehow she could not think of Wolf as very much affected. He hated society, primarily, and he would never be idle, not for the treasures of India. He would let her spend it as she pleased, and go on working rapturously at his valves and meters and gauges, perhaps delighted if she bought him the costliest motor-car made, or the finest of mechanical piano-players, but quite as willing that the pearls about his wife's throat should cost fifty dollars as fifty thousand, and quite as anxious that the heiress of the Melroses should "make good" with his associate workers as if she had been still a little clerk from Biretta's Bookshop! But cheerfully indifferent as he was to everything that made life worth living to such a man as Christopher Liggett, she knew that he would not go to California without her unless there was a definite break between them. She knew she could not persuade him to leave her here, as a normal and pleasant solution, just until everything was settled, and until they could see a little further ahead. No, Wolf was annoyingly conventional where his wife was concerned: her place was with him, unless for some secondary reason they had decided to part. And she knew that if he let her go it would be because he felt that he never should have claimed her--that, in the highest sense, he never had had her at all. CHAPTER XXXII Moving automatically through the solemn scenes of the next two days, that, mused Norma, must be the solution. Wolf must go alone to California. Not because she did not love him--who could help loving him indeed?--but because she loved Chris more--or differently, at least, and she belonged to Chris's world now, by every right of birth, wealth, and position.