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 taken a great liking to Rodney.  His manner toward her had just the blend of deference and breezy unconventionality that pleased her.  So, while Portia would worry through the dinner, for fear it wouldn’t be cooked well enough, or served well enough, not to present a sorry contrast to the meals her guests were accustomed to, her mother would sit beaming upon the pair with a contentment as unalloyed as if Rose were the acknowledged new leader of the great Cause and her husband her adoring convert, as they had been in her old day-dream.

As far as Rodney went, the dream might have been true, for he showed an unending interest in the Woman Movement—­never tired of drawing from his mother-in-law the story of her labors and the exposition of her beliefs.  Sometimes he argued with her playfully in order to get her started.  More often, and as far as Portia could see, quite seriously, he professed himself in full accord with her views.

After this had been going on for about so long, Rose would yawn and stretch and sit down on the arm of her mother’s chair, begin stroking her hair and offering her all manner of quaint unexpected caresses.  And then, pretty soon, Rodney’s attention to the subject would begin to wander and at last flag altogether and leave him stranded, gazing and unable to do anything but gaze, at the lovely creature—­the still miraculous creature, who, when he got her home again, would come and sit on the arm of his chair like that!  When this happened, Portia found it hard to stay in the room.