ps, but it was honest and happy, too, and it was real. There
was no affectation here, even the premature spring hats, and the rouge,
and the high heels were an ingenuous bid for just a little notice, just
a little admiration, just a little longer youth.

Sauntering along in the very heart of it, hearing the flirtation, the
theatrical chatter, the homely gossip about her, Norma knew that she was
at home. Leslie, perhaps, might have loathed it had she been put down in
the midst of it; to Aunt Annie it would always seem entirely beneath
even contempt. But Norma realized to-night, as she slipped into church
for a few minutes, as she dropped a coin into a beggar's tin cup, as she
entered into casual conversation with the angry mother of a defiant boy,
that this, to her, was life. It was life--to work, to plan, to marry and
bear children, to wrest her own home from unfavourable conditions, and
help her own man to win. She would live, because she would care--care
deeply how Wolf fared in his work, how her house prospered, how her
children developed. She would not be Aunt Annie's sort of woman--Chris's
sort--she would be herself, judged not by what she had, but by what she
could do--what she could give.

"And that's the kind of woman I am, after all," she said to herself,
rejoicingly. "The child of a French maid and a spoiled, rich young man!
But no, I'm not their child. I'm Aunt Kate's--just as much as Rose and
Wolf are----!" And at the thought of Wolf she smiled. "Won't Wolf
Sheridan _open his eyes_?"

When she reached Forty-first Street she turned east, and went past the
familiar door of the opera house. It was a special performance, and the
waiting line stretched from the box office down the street, and around
the corner, into the dark. They would only be able to buy standing
room, these patient happy music lovers who grew weary and cold waiting
for their treat, and even standing, they would be behind an immovable
crowd, they would catch only occasional glimpses of the stage. But Norma
told herself that she would rather be in that line, than yawningly
deciding, as she had so often seen Annie decide, that she would perhaps
rustle into the box at ten o'clock for the third act--although it was
rather a bore.

She flitted near enough to see the general stir, and to see once more
the sign "No Footmen Allowed in This Lobby," and then, smiling at the
old memories, she slipped away into the darkness, drinking in insatiably
the