sure, she had
been accustomed to accepting history merely as a more or less accurate
record of bygone events without philosophizing upon it. But to him it
was one long chronicle of wrong and oppression. He pronounced the dead
and gone sovereigns of England a bad lot and cowardly almost without
exception; not apparently objecting to them on the ground that they were
kings, as she had at first thought, but because they attained their
ends, mostly selfish, through cruelty and oppression, without any
regard for humane rights.

It was the same way with books of travel. The chateaus and castles, with
all their atmosphere of story and romance which she had always longed to
visit, interested him not a jot. In his opinion they were, one and all,
bloody monuments of greed and selfishness; the sooner they were razed to
the ground and forgotten, the better for the world.

It was useless to make an appeal for them on artistic grounds; art to
him was a doubly sealed book, and yet he frequently disclosed an innate
love of beauty in his appreciation of the changing panorama of the
winter landscape which stretched on every side before their eyes.

It was a picture which had an inexhaustible fascination for Nora
herself, although there were times when the isolation, and above all the
unbroken stillness got badly on her nerves. But she could not rid
herself of an almost superstitious feeling that the prairie had a lesson
to teach her. Twice they went in to Prentice. With these exceptions, she
saw no one but her husband and Mr. and Mrs. Sharp.

But it was, strangely enough, from Mrs. Sharp that she drew the most
illumination as to the real meaning of this strange new life. Not that
Mrs. Sharp was in the least subtle, quite the contrary. She was as
hard-headed, practical a person as one could well imagine. But her
natural powers of adaptability must have been unusually great. From a
small shop in one of the outlying suburbs of London, with its
circumscribed outlook, moral as well as physical, to the limitless
horizon of the prairie was indeed a far cry. How much inward
readjustment such a violent transplanting must require, Nora had
sufficient imagination to fully appreciate. But if Mrs. Sharp, herself,
were conscious of having not only survived her uprooting but of having
triumphantly grown and thrived in this alien soil, she gave no sign of
it. Everything, to employ her own favorite phrase with which she
breached over inexplicable ch