te sort of--I'm expressing myself badly, but you understand--a
conglomerate total of all these things that make him an aristocrat!
That's what he is, an aristocrat. Now, I'm not! I've found that out. I'm
different."

"Nonsense!" Chris said, lightly, but listening patiently none the less.

"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 manne