Until Mrs. Stanton’s terrifying illness along in January, these meetings constituted the whole of the intercourse between the families.  Rose had done her best to carry Portia with her, to some extent at least, into her new life—­to introduce her to her new friends and make her, as far as might be, one of them.  And in this she was seconded very amiably, by Frederica.  But Portia had put down a categorical veto on all these attempts.  She hadn’t the inclination nor the energy, she said, and her mother needed all the time she could spare away from her business.  Once, when Rose pressed the matter, she gave a more genuine reason.  Rose’s new friends, she said, would regard her introduction to them solely as a bid for business.  She didn’t want them coming around to her place to buy their wedding presents “in order to help out that poor old maid sister of Rose Aldrich’s.”  She was getting business enough in legitimate ways.

Sometimes she told herself that if Rose had really wanted her, she’d have pressed the matter harder—­wouldn’t have given up unless she was clutching with real relief at an excuse that let her out of an embarrassment.  But at other times she accused herself of having acted in a petty snobbish spirit in declining the chance not only for pleasant new friendships, especially Frederica’s, but for a closer association with her sister.  Well, the thing was done now, and the question certainly never would rise again.

The reason why it couldn’t arise again was what Portia came to tell Rose this morning.  She hoped she’d be able to tell it gently—­provide Rose with just the facts she’d have to know, and get away without letting any other facts escape, so that afterward she’d have the consolation of being able to say to herself, “That was finely done.”  All her life, she told herself, she had been doing fine things grudgingly, mutilating them in the doing.  If she weren’t very careful, that would happen this morning.  If she could have known the truth and made her resolution, and confided it to Rose during the first hours of her mother’s illness, when the fight for life had drawn them together, it would not have been hard.  But with the beginning of convalescence, when Rose, with an easy visit and a few facile caresses, could outweigh in one hour, all of Portia’s unremitting tireless service during the other twenty-three, and carry off as a prize the whole of her mother’s gratitude and affection, the old envy and irritation had come back threefold.

Rose greeted her with a “Hello, Angel!  Why didn’t you come right up?  Isn’t it disgraceful to be lying around in bed like this in the middle of the morning?”

“I don’t know,” said Portia.  “Might as well stay in bed, if you’ve nothing to do when you get up.”  She meant it to sound good-humored, but was afraid it didn’t.  “Anyhow,” she added after a straight look into Rose’s face, “you look, this morning, as if bed was just where you ought to be.  What’s the matter with you, child?”