tting maudlin, and she knew it! And when she got over
feeling so weak and giddy, she'd brace up and be herself again. But for
the present, she didn't feel like seeing Portia.

But Rose's shrinking from a talk with Portia that morning was a mild
feeling compared with Portia's dread of the impending talk with Rose.
Twice she had walked by the perfect doorway of the McCrea house before
she entered it; ostensibly to give herself a little more time to
think--really, because she shrank from the ordeal that awaited her in
there.

Her sister's menage had been a source of irritation to Portia ever since
it was established, though a deeper irritation was her own with herself
for allowing it to affect her thus. Rose's whole-hearted plunge into the
frivolities of a social season, her outspoken delight in it, her finding
in it, apparently, a completely satisfactory solution to the problem of
existence, couldn't fail to arouse Portia's ironic smile. This was the
sort of vessel her mother had freighted with her hopes! This was the
course she steered.

She had fought this feeling with a bitter self-contempt. The trouble
with her was, she told herself in icy self-communings, that she envied
Rose her happiness, her opportunities, her husband--even her house. Why
should all that wonderful furniture have been wasted on Rose, to whom a
perfect old Jacobean gate-legged table was nothing but a surface to drop
anything on that she wanted out of her hands? Why should a man of
Rodney's powerful intelligence waste his time on her frivolous
amusements, content, apparently, just to sit and gaze at her, oblivious
of any one else who might happen to be about? She knew that she, Portia,
out of her disciplined experience of life, and her real eagerness for
knowledge of it, was better able to challenge the attention of his mind
than Rose. And yet she had never really got it. She remained half
invisible to him--some one to be remembered with a start, after an
interval of oblivion, and treated considerately--even affectionately,
for that matter--as Rose's sister!

They had been seeing each other with reasonable frequency all winter.
The Aldriches had Portia and her mother in to a family dinner pretty
often, and always came out to Edgewater for a one-o'clock dinner with
the Stantons on Sunday. The habit was for Rose to come out early in the
car and take them to church, while Rodney walked out later, and turned
up in time for dinner.

Mrs. Stanton had