At that Rose came over to her, dropped on the floor at her knees and embraced her.

“I guess perhaps I understand, mother,” she said.  “I didn’t realize—­you’ve always been so intellectual and advanced—­that you’d feel that way about it—­be shocked because I hadn’t pretended not to care for him and been shy and coy”—­in spite of herself, her voice got an edge of humor in it—­“and a startled fawn, you know, running away, but just not fast enough so that he wouldn’t come running after and think he’d made a wonderful conquest by catching me at last.  But a man like Rodney Aldrich wouldn’t plead and protest, mother.  He wouldn’t want me unless I wanted him just as much.”

It was a long time before her mother spoke and when she did, she spoke humbly—­resignedly, as if admitting that the situation she was confronted with was beyond her powers.

“It’s the one need of a woman’s life, Rose, dear,” she said, “—­the corner-stone of all her happiness, that her husband, as you say, ‘wants’ her.  It’s something that—­not in words, of course, but in all the little facts of married life—­she’ll need to be reassured about every day.  Doubt of it is the one thing that will have the power to make her bitterly unhappy.  That’s why it seems to me so terribly necessary that she be sure about it before it’s too late.”

“Yes, of course,” said Rose.  “But that’s true of the man, too, isn’t it?  Otherwise, where’s the equality?”

Her mother couldn’t answer that except with a long sigh.

Strangely enough, it wasn’t until after Rose had gone away, and she had shut herself up in her room to think, that any other aspect of the situation occurred to her—­even that there was another aspect of it which she’d naturally have expected to be the first and only critical one.

Ever since babyhood Rose had been devoted, by all her mother’s plans and hopes, to the furtherance of the cause of Woman, whose ardent champion she herself had always been.  For Rose—­not Portia—­was the devoted one.

The elder daughter had been born at a time when her own activities were at their height.  As Portia herself had said, when she and her two brothers were little, their mother had been too busy to—­luxuriate in them very much and during those early and possibly suggestible years, Portia had been suffered to grow up, as it were, by herself.  She was not neglected, of course, and she was dearly loved.  But when, for the first time since actual babyhood, she got into the focal-plane of her mother’s mind again, there was a subtle, but, it seemed, ineradicable antagonism between them, though that perhaps is too strong a word for it.  A difference there was, anyway, in the grain of their two minds, that hindered unreserved confidences, no matter how hard they might try for them.  Portia’s brusk disdain of rhetoric, her habit of reducing questions to their least denominator of common sense, carried a constant and perfectly involuntary criticism of her mother’s ampler and more emotional style—­made her suspect that Portia regarded her as a sentimentalist.