done her best to carry Portia with her, to some extent at least, into
her new life--to introduce her to her new friends and make her, as far
as might be, one of them. And in this she was seconded very amiably, by
Frederica. But Portia had put down a categorical veto on all these
attempts. She hadn't the inclination nor the energy, she said, and her
mother needed all the time she could spare away from her business. Once,
when Rose pressed the matter, she gave a more genuine reason. Rose's new
friends, she said, would regard her introduction to them solely as a bid
for business. She didn't want them coming around to her place to buy
their wedding presents "in order to help out that poor old maid sister
of Rose Aldrich's." She was getting business enough in legitimate ways.

Sometimes she told herself that if Rose had really wanted her, she'd
have pressed the matter harder--wouldn't have given up unless she was
clutching with real relief at an excuse that let her out of an
embarrassment. But at other times she accused herself of having acted in
a petty snobbish spirit in declining the chance not only for pleasant
new friendships, especially Frederica's, but for a closer association
with her sister. Well, the thing was done now, and the question
certainly never would rise again.

The reason why it couldn't arise again was what Portia came to tell Rose
this morning. She hoped she'd be able to tell it gently--provide Rose
with just the facts she'd have to know, and get away without letting any
other facts escape, so that afterward she'd have the consolation of
being able to say to herself, "That was finely done." All her life, she
told herself, she had been doing fine things grudgingly, mutilating them
in the doing. If she weren't very careful, that would happen this
morning. If she could have known the truth and made her resolution, and
confided it to Rose during the first hours of her mother's illness, when