velvety skin emerging with its bloom
untouched, the lips crimson, the blue eyes blazing. She pressed a great
wave of silky dark hair across her white forehead, and put the
fur-trimmed hat at a dashing angle. The lace blouse, the pearl beads,
her fur-collared coat again, and Norma was ready to dance out beside
Wolf as if fatigue and labours did not exist.

"Where's Rose?" he said, as they went downstairs.

"Oh, Wolf--Saturday night! Harry's coming, of course!" Norma slipped her
little hand, in its shabby glove, through his big arm. "She and Aunt
Kate were gossiping!"

"Suits me!" Wolf said, contentedly. He held her firmly on the slippery
lumps of packed snow. The sidewalks were almost impassable, yet hundreds
of other happy persons were stumbling and scrambling over them in the
mild winter darkness. Stars were out; and whether Norma was blinking up
at them, or staring into lighted windows of candy stores and fruit
markets, her own eyes danced and twinkled. The elevated trains thundered
above their heads, and the subway roared under their feet; great
advertising signs, with thousands of coloured lights, fanned up and down
in a haze of pink and blue; the air was full of voices, laughing and
shouting, and the screaming of coasting children.

"I have my pearls on," Norma told her companion. They stopped for some
molasses peppermints, and their pungent odour mingled for Norma in the
impression of this happy hour. "Wolf, how do they do that?" the girl
asked, watching an electric sign on which a maid mopped a dirty floor
with some prepared cleaner, leaving the floor clean after her mop. Wolf,
interested, explained, and Norma listened. They stopped at a drug store,
and studied a picture that subtly altered from Roosevelt's face to
Lincoln's, and thence to Wilson's face, and Wolf explained that, too.
Norma knew that he understood everything of that nature, but she liked
to impress him, too, and did so far more often than she realized, with
her book-lore. When Norma spoke lightly of a full calf edition de luxe
of the Sonnets from the Portuguese, she might almost have been speaking
in that language for all she conveyed to Wolf, but he watched the
animated face proudly just the same. Rose had always been good and
steady and thoughtful, but Wolf knew that Norma was clever, taking his
big-brotherly patronage with admiring awe, but daring where he
hesitated, and boldly at home where he was ill at ease. When she said
that when she