asms, "was all in a lifetime."

As she had a deeply rooted distaste for any form of exercise beyond that
which was required in the day's work, most of the visiting between them
devolved upon Nora. To her the distance that separated the two houses
was nothing, and as she had from the first taken a genuine liking to her
neighbor she found herself going over to the Sharps' several times a
week.

When, as was natural at first, she felt discouraged over her little
domestic failures, she found these neighborly visits a great tonic.
Mrs. Sharp was always ready to give advice when appealed to. And unlike
Gertie, she never expressed astonishment at her visitor's ignorance, or
impatience with her shortcomings. These became more and more infrequent.
Nora made up for her total lack of experience by an intelligent
willingness to be taught. There was a certain stimulation in the thought
that she was learning to manage her own house, that would have been
lacking while at her brother's even if Gertie had displayed a more
agreeable willingness to impart her own knowledge.

Nora had always been fond of children, and she found the Sharp children
unusually interesting. It was curious to see how widely the ideas of
this, the first generation born in the new country, differed, not only
from those of their parents, but from what they must have inevitably
been if they had remained in the environment that would have been theirs
had they been born and brought up back in England.

All of their dreams as to what they were going to do when they grew to
manhood were colored and shaped by the outdoor life they had been
accustomed to. They were to be farmers and cattle raisers on a large
scale. Mrs. Sharp used to shake her head sometimes as she heard these
grandiloquent plans, but Nora could see that she was secretly both
proud and pleased. After all, why should not these dreams be realized?
Everything was possible to the children of this new and wonderful
country, if they were only industrious and ambitious.

"I don't know, I'm sure, what their poor dear grandfather would have
said if he had lived to hear them," she used to say sometimes to Nora.
"_He_ used to think that there was nothing so genteel as having a good
shop. He quite looked down on farming folk. Still, everything is
different out here, ideas as well as everything else, and I'm not at all
sure they won't be better off in the end."

In which notion Nora secretly agreed with her. To