ands of little-girl
Normas, and bookshop Normas, and to the memorable picture of a debutante
Norma at her first opera, Wolf carried away with him to-night one more
Norma: a brown, self-possessed, prettier-than-ever Norma, in a wide
English hat and a plain linen suit, and transparent green silk stockings
that matched her green silk parasol.

She got down from the omnibus, a few blocks farther away, and walked
slowly along the shady side of the burning cross-streets, thinking,
thinking, thinking. It was the hottest hour of the afternoon; there
would be a storm to-night, but just now the air hung motionless, and the
shadows were almost as dazzling, in their baking dimness, as the
sunshine. Houses were closed and silent, show windows bare; the
omnibuses creaked by loaded with passengers, trying to get cool. There
was an odour of frying potatoes; other odours, stale and lifeless, crept
through the stale and lifeless air.

Norma was entirely familiar with this phase of city life, for, except
for Sundays at Coney Island, or picnicking on some beach or in some
meadow or wood of Connecticut, she and the Sheridans had weathered two
successive hot seasons very comfortably within two hundred yards of
Broadway. It held no particular horrors for her; she reflected that in
another hour or two the sun would quite have died away, and then every
flight of old brownstone steps would hold its chatting group, and every
street its scores of screaming and running children.

Wherever her thoughts carried her, they began and ended with
Christopher. He had never kissed her again after the night of his return
from Miami; he had hardly touched even her hand, and he had said no word
of love. But, as the summer progressed, these two had grown steadily to
live more and more for each other, for just the casual friendly looks
and words of ordinary intercourse in the presence of other persons, and
for the chance hours that Fate now and then permitted them alone.

Norma, in every other relationship grown more whimsical and more
restless, showing new phases of frivolity and shallowness to the world,
had deepened and developed, under Chris's eyes, into her own highest
possibility of womanhood. To him she was earnest, honest, only anxious
to be good and to be true. He knew the viewpoint of that wiser self that
was the real Norma; he knew how wide open those blue eyes were to what
was false and worthless in the world around her.

And Norma had seen him