It argued no real lack of sisterly affection that Rose didn't want to
see Portia that morning. Even if there had been no other reason, being
found in bed at half past ten in the morning by a sister who inflexibly
opened her little shop at half past eight, regardless of bad weather,
backaches and other potentially valid excuses, was enough to make one
feel apologetic and worthless. Rose could truthfully say that she was
feeling wretched. But Portia would sit there, slim and erect, in a
little straight-backed chair, and whatever perfunctory commiseration she
might manage to express, the look of her fine eyebrows would be
skeptical. Justly, too. Rose could never deny that. Not so long as she
could remember the innumerable times when she had yielded to her
mother's persuasions that she was over-tired and that a morning in bed
was just what she needed. Portia, so far as she could remember, had
never been the subject of these persuasions.

But this was only the beginning of Rose's troubles to-day. She was
paying the price of yesterday's exaltation and her spirits had sunk down
to nowhere. What a fool's paradise yesterday had been with its vision of
her big self-sufficient husband coming to her for mothering because he
had lost a law-suit! What a piece of mordant irony it was, that she
should have found herself, after all her silly hopes, sobbing in his
arms, while he comforted her for her bitter disappointment over not
being able to comfort him! She had told the truth when she said he was
the one, really, who didn't know how funny it was.

Well, and wasn't her other effort just as ridiculous? If ever he found
her heap of law-books and learned of the wretched hours she had spent
trying to discover what they were all about in the hope of promoting
herself to a true intellectual companionship with him, wouldn't he take