It was not hypocrisy, Norma thought. Annie had been a good daughter. Indeed she had been unusually loyal, as the daughters of Annie's set saw their filial duties. But something in this overwhelming, becoming grief, combined with so lively a sense of what was socially correct, jarred unpleasantly on the younger woman. Of course, funerals had to have management, like everything else. And it was only part of Annie's code to believe that an awkwardness now, a social error ever so faint, an opportunity given the world for amusement or criticism, would reflect upon the family and upon the dead. Norma carried on long mental conversations with Wolf, criticizing or defending the Melroses. She imagined herself telling him of the shock it had given her to realize that her grandmother's body was barely cold before an autocratic and noisy French hairdresser had arrived, demanding electric heat and hand-glasses as casually as if his customer had been the bustling, vain old lady of a week ago. 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." Wolf, who would not laugh at one tenth of the things that amused Chris, or that Annie found richly funny, would laugh at these little glimpses of a formal funeral, Norma knew, and he would remember other odd bits of reading that were in the same key--from Macaulay, or Henry George, or a scrap of newspaper that had chanced to be pasted upon an engine-house wall. Leslie came into the house late on the afternoon of Friday, and there was much fresh crying between her and Annie. Leslie had on new black, too, "just what I could grab down there," she explained--and was pettish and weary with fatigue and the nervous shock. She gave only the side of her cheek to Acton's dutiful kiss, and answered his question about the baby with an impatient, "Oh, heavens, she's all _right_! What could be the matter with her? She did have a cold, but now she's all right--and when I'm half-crazy about Grandma and poor Aunt Alice, I do _wish_ you wouldn't take me up so quickly. I've been travelling all night, and my head is splitting! If it was _I_ that had the cold, I don't believe you'd be so fussy!" "Poor little girl, it's hard for you not to have seen them once more," Christopher said, tenderly, failing to meet the half-amused and half-indignant glance that Norma sent him. Leslie burst into self-pitying tears, and held tight to his hand, as they all sat down in Annie's room. "I believe I feel it most for you, Uncle Chris," she sobbed.