In short, Norma mused, watching him as he fell into moody silence, he had not scrupled to break the spirit of his bond to Alice, he had not hesitated to tell Norma that he loved her when only Norma, and possibly Alice, might suffer from his disloyalty. But when the sacred letter was touched, the sacred outside of the vessel that must be kept clean before the world, then Chris was instantly the impeccable, the irreproachable man of his caste again. It was all part of the superficial smallness of that world where arbitrary form ruled, where to send a wedding invitation printed and not engraved, or to mispronounce the name of a visiting Italian tenor or Russian dancer, would mark the noblest woman in the world as hopelessly "not belonging." "One of the things you do that really you oughtn't to, Norma," he resumed, presently, in quiet distaste, "is assume that there is some mysterious difference between, say, the Craigies, and well--your husband. The Craigies are enormously wealthy, of course. That means that they have always had fine service, music, travel, the best of everything in educational ways, friendship with the best people--and those things _are_ an advantage, generation after generation. It's absurd to deny that Annie's children, for example, haven't any real and tremendous advantages over--well, some child of a perfectly respectable family that manages nicely on ten thousand a year. But that Annie's pleasures are not as real, or that there must necessarily be something dangerous--something detestable--in the life of the best people, is ridiculous!" "That's just what I do assert," she answered, bravely. "It may not be so for you, for you were born to it! But when you've lived, as I have, in a different sort of life, with people to whom meals, and the rent, and their jobs, really matter--this sort of thing doesn't seem _real_. You feel like bursting out laughing and saying, 'Oh, get out! What's the difference if I _don't_ make calls, and broaden my vowels, and wear just this and that, and say just this and that!' It all seems so _tame_." "Not at all," Chris said, really roused. "Take Betty Doane, now, the Craigies' cousin. There's nothing conventional about her. There's a girl who dresses like a man all summer, who ran away from school and tramped into Hungary dressed as a gipsy, who slapped Joe Brinckerhoff's face for him last winter, and who says that when she loves a man she's going off with him--no matter who he is, or whether he's married or not, or whether she is!" "I'll tell you what she sounds like to me, Chris, a little saucy girl of about eight trying to see how naughty she can be! Why, that," said Norma, eagerly, "that's not _real_. That isn't like house-hunting when you know you can't pay more than thirty dollars' rent, or surprising your husband with a new thermos bottle that he didn't think he could afford!"