But Rose, with her first adorable smile, had captured her mother’s heart beyond the possibility of reservation or restraint.  And, as the child grew and her splendid, exuberant vitality and courage and wide-reaching, though not facile, affection became marked characteristics, the hope grew in her mother that here was a new leader born to the great Cause.  It would need new leaders.  She herself was conscious of a side drift to the great current, that threatened to leave her in a backwater.  Or, as she put it to herself, that threatened to sweep over the banks of righteousness and decorum, and inundate, disastrously, the peaceful fields.

She couldn’t expect to have the strength to resist this drift herself, but she had a vision of her daughter rising splendidly to the task.  And for that task she trained her—­or thought she did; saw to it that the girl understood the Eighteenth Century Liberalism, which, limited to the fields of politics and education, and extended to include women equally with men, was the gospel of the movement she had grown up in.  With it for a background, with a university education and a legal training, the girl would have everything she needed.

She expected her to marry, of course.  But in her day-dreams, it was to be one of Rose’s converts to the cause—­won perhaps by her advocacy at the bar, of some legal case involving the rights of woman—­who was to lay his new-born conviction, along with his personal adoration, at the girl’s feet.

Certainly Rodney Aldrich, who, as Rose outrageously had boasted, rolled her in the dust and tramped all over her in the course of their arguments, presented a violent contrast to the ideal husband she had selected.  Indeed, it should be hard to think of him as anything but the rock on which her whole ambition for the girl would be shattered.

It was strange she hadn’t thought of that during her talk with Rose!

Now that the idea had occurred to her she tried hard to look at the event that way and to nurse into energetic life a tragic regret over the miscarriage of a lifetime’s hope.  It was all so obviously what she ought to feel.  Yet the moment she relaxed the effort, her mind flew back to a vibration between a hope and a fear:  the hope, that the man Rose was about to marry would shelter and protect her always, as tenderly as she herself had sheltered her; the terror—­and this was stronger—­that he might not.

That night, during the process of getting ready for bed, Rose put on a bath-robe, picked up her hair brush and went into Portia’s room.  Portia, much quicker always about such matters, was already on the point of turning out the light, but guessing what her sister wanted, she stacked her pillows, lighted a cigarette, climbed into bed and settled back comfortably for a chat.

“I hope,” Rose began, “that you’re really pleased about it.  Because mother isn’t.  She’s terribly unhappy.  Do you suppose it’s because she thinks I’ve—­well, sort of deserted her, in not going on and being a lawyer—­and all that?”