She compared him with her brother, and with other men she had known and respected.  Was he less honest? less brave? less independent? less scrupulous in his dealings with his fellowmen?  To all these questions she was obliged to answer “No.”  And he was proud, too, and ambitious; ambitious to carve out a fortune with his own hands, beholden to neither man nor circumstances for the achievement.  Certainly there was much that was fine about him.

And, as far as his treatment of herself was concerned, after that first terrible struggle for mastery, she had had nothing to complain of.  He had been patient with her ignorance and her lack of capabilities in all the things that the women in this new life were so proficient in.  Did she not, perhaps, fall as far below his standard as he did before hers?  There was certainly something to be said on both sides.

There was one quality which he possessed to which she paid ungrudging tribute; never had she met a man so free from all petty pretense.  He regretted his lack of opportunities for educating himself, but it apparently never entered his head to pretend a knowledge of even the simplest subject which he did not possess.  The questions that he asked her from time to time about matters which almost any schoolboy in England could have answered, both touched and embarrassed her.

At first she had found the evenings the most trying part of the day.  When not taken up with her household cares, she found herself becoming absurdly self-conscious in his society.  They were neither of them naturally silent people, and it was difficult not to have the air of “talking down” to him, of palpably making conversation.  Beyond the people at her brother’s and the Sharps, they had not a single acquaintance in common.  Her horizon, hitherto, had been, bounded by England, his by Canada.

Finally, acting on the suggestion he had made, but never again referred to, the unforgettable day when they were leaving for Winnipeg, she began reading aloud evenings while he worked on his new chairs.  The experiment was a great success.  Her little library was limited in range; a few standard works and a number of books on travel and some of history.  She soon found that history was what he most enjoyed.  Things that were a commonplace to her were revealed to him for the first time.  And his comments were keen and intelligent, although his point of view was strikingly novel and at the opposite pole from hers.  To be sure, she had been accustomed to accepting history merely as a more or less accurate record of bygone events without philosophizing upon it.  But to him it was one long chronicle of wrong and oppression.  He pronounced the dead and gone sovereigns of England a bad lot and cowardly almost without exception; not apparently objecting to them on the ground that they were kings, as she had at first thought, but because they attained their ends, mostly selfish, through cruelty and oppression, without any regard for humane rights.