Rose’s head drooped lower.  She buried her face in her hands.  “I do envy you,” she said.  There was a dull muffled passion in her voice.  “Why shouldn’t I envy you?  You’re so cold and certain all the time.  You make up your mind what you’ll do, and you do it.  I try to do things and just make myself ridiculous.  Oh, I know I’ve got a motor and a lot of French dresses, and a maid, and I don’t have to get up in the morning, because, as you say, I have nothing else to do—­and I suppose that might make some people happy.”

“You’ve got a husband,” said Portia in a thin brittle voice.  “That might count for something, I should think.”

“Yes, and what good am I to him?” Rose demanded.  “He can’t talk to me—­not about his work or anything like that.  And I can’t help him any way.  I’m something nice for him to make love to, when he feels like doing it, and I’m a nuisance when I make scenes and get tragic.  And that’s all.  That’s—­marriage, I guess.  You’re the lucky one, Portia.”

The silence had lasted a good while before Rose noticed that there was any special quality about it—­became aware that since the end of her outburst—­of which she was ashamed even while she yielded to it, because it represented not what she meant, but what, at the moment, she felt—­Portia had not stirred; had sat there as rigidly still as a figure carved in ivory.

Becoming aware of that, she raised her head.  Portia wasn’t looking at her, but down at her own clenched hands.

“It needed just that, I suppose,” she heard her older sister say between almost motionless lips.  “I thought it was pretty complete before, but it took that to make it perfect—­that you think I’m the lucky one—­lucky never to have had a husband, or any one else for that matter, to love me.  And lucky now, to have to give up the only substitute I had for that.”

“Portia!” Rose cried out, for the mordant alkaline bitterness in her sister’s voice and the tragic irony in her face, were almost terrifying.  But the outcry might never have been uttered for any effect it had.

“I hoped this wouldn’t happen,” the words came steadily on, one at a time.  “I hoped I could get this over and get away out of your life altogether without letting it happen.  But I can’t.  Perhaps it’s just as well—­perhaps it may do you some good.  But that’s not why I’m doing it.  I’m doing it for myself.  Just for once, I’m going to let go!  You won’t like it.  You’re going to get hurt.”

Rose drew herself erect and a curious change went over her face, so that you wouldn’t have known she’d been crying.  She drew in a long breath and said, very steadily, “Tell me.  I shan’t try to get away.”

“A man came to our house one day to collect a bill,” Portia went on, quite as if Rose hadn’t spoken.  “Mother was out, and I was at home.  I was seventeen then, getting ready to go to Vassar.  Fred was a sophomore at Ann Arbor, and Harvey was going to graduate in June.  You were only seven—­I suppose you were at school.  Anyhow, I was at home, and I let him in, and he made a fuss.  Said he’d have us black-listed by other grocers, if it wasn’t paid.