uld mean a new solitude and
loneliness to her, her husband, of necessity, being away through all the
long daylight hours. She began to understand Gertie's dread of having no
one to speak to. She avoided asking herself the question as to whether
it was loneliness in general or the particular loneliness of missing her
husband that she dreaded.

But she was obliged to admit to herself that the winter had wrought more
transformations than were to be seen in the little shack.

CHAPTER XV

It had all come about so subtilely and gradually that she was almost
unaware of it herself, this inward change _in_ herself. Nora had by
nature a quick and active mind, but she had also many inherited
prejudices. It is a truism that it is much harder to unlearn than to
learn, and for her it was harder, in the circumstances, than for the
average person. Not that she was more set in her ways than other people,
but that she had accepted from her childhood a definite set of ideas as
to the proper conduct of life; a code, in other words, from which she
had never conceived it possible to depart. People did certain things, or
they did not; you played the game according to certain prescribed rules,
or you didn't play it with decent people, that was all there was to it.
One might as well argue that there was no difference between right and
wrong as to say that this was not so.

Of course there were plenty of people on the face of the earth who
thought otherwise, such as Chinese, Aborigines, Turks, and all sorts of
unpleasant natives of uncivilized countries--Nora lumped them together
without discrimination or remorse--but no one planned to pass their
lives among them. And as for the sentiment that Trotter had enunciated
one day at her brother's, that Canada was a country where everybody was
as good as everybody else, that was, of course, utter nonsense. It was
because the country was raw and new that such silly notions prevailed.
No society could exist an hour founded upon any such theory.

And yet, here she was living with a man on terms of equality whom, when
measured up with the standards she was accustomed to, failed impossibly.
And yet, did he? That is, did he, in the larger sense? That he was
woefully deficient in all the little niceties of life, that he was
illiterate and ignorant could not be denied. But he was no man's fool,
and, as far as his light shone, he certainly lived up to it. That was
just it. He had a standard of his