"I know," Norma resumed, hammering her thought out slowly, and frowning down at the teaspoon that she was measuring between her finger-tips, "I know that there are two women in me. One is the Melrose, who _could_--for I know I could!--push her husband out of sight, take up the whole business of doing things correctly, from hair-dressing and writing notes of condolence to being"--she could manage a hint of a smile under swiftly raised lashes--"being presented at Saint James's!" she said. "In five years she would be an admired and correct and popular woman, and perhaps even married to this man I speak of! The other woman is my little plain French mother's sort--who was a servant--my Aunt Kate's kind," and Norma suddenly felt the tears in her eyes, and winked them away with an April smile, "who belongs to her husband, who likes to cook and tramp about in the woods, and send Christmas boxes to Rose's babies, and--and go to movies, and picnics! And that's the sort of woman I _am_, Chris," Norma ended, with a sudden firmness, and even a certain relief in her voice. "I've just discovered it! I've been spoiled all my life--I've been loved too much, I think, but I've thought it all out--it really came to me, as I stood beside Aunt Marianna's grave to-day, and you don't know how happy it's made me!" "You are talking very recklessly, Norma," Chris said, as she paused, in his quiet, definite voice. "You are over-excited now. There is no such difference in the two--the two classes, to call them that, as you fancy! The richer people, the people who, as you say, do things correctly, and are presented at Saint James's, have all the simple pleasures, too. One likes moving pictures now and then; I'm sure we often have picnics in the summer. But there are women in New York--hundreds of them, who would give the last twenty years of their lives to step into exactly what you can take for the asking now. You will have Annie and me back of you--this isn't the time, Norma, for me to say just how entirely you will have my championship! But surely you know----" He was just what he had always been: self-possessed, finished, splendidly sure in voice and manner. He was rich, he was popular, he was a dictator in his quiet way. And she knew even if the shock of his wife's sudden going had pushed his thought of her into the background, that in a few months he would be hovering about her again, conventionally freed for conventional devotion. She saw all this, and for the first time to-day she saw other things, too. That he was forty, and looked it. That there was just the faintest suggestion of thinning in his smooth hair, where Wolf's magnificent mane was the thickest. That it was just a little bloodless, this decorous mourning that had so instantly engulfed him, who had actually told her, another man's wife, a few weeks before, that his own wife was dying, and so would free him for the woman he loved at last!