It was the same way with books of travel.  The chateaus and castles, with all their atmosphere of story and romance which she had always longed to visit, interested him not a jot.  In his opinion they were, one and all, bloody monuments of greed and selfishness; the sooner they were razed to the ground and forgotten, the better for the world.

It was useless to make an appeal for them on artistic grounds; art to him was a doubly sealed book, and yet he frequently disclosed an innate love of beauty in his appreciation of the changing panorama of the winter landscape which stretched on every side before their eyes.

It was a picture which had an inexhaustible fascination for Nora herself, although there were times when the isolation, and above all the unbroken stillness got badly on her nerves.  But she could not rid herself of an almost superstitious feeling that the prairie had a lesson to teach her.  Twice they went in to Prentice.  With these exceptions, she saw no one but her husband and Mr. and Mrs. Sharp.

But it was, strangely enough, from Mrs. Sharp that she drew the most illumination as to the real meaning of this strange new life.  Not that Mrs. Sharp was in the least subtle, quite the contrary.  She was as hard-headed, practical a person as one could well imagine.  But her natural powers of adaptability must have been unusually great.  From a small shop in one of the outlying suburbs of London, with its circumscribed outlook, moral as well as physical, to the limitless horizon of the prairie was indeed a far cry.  How much inward readjustment such a violent transplanting must require, Nora had sufficient imagination to fully appreciate.  But if Mrs. Sharp, herself, were conscious of having not only survived her uprooting but of having triumphantly grown and thrived in this alien soil, she gave no sign of it.  Everything, to employ her own favorite phrase with which she breached over inexplicable chasms, “was all in a lifetime.”

As she had a deeply rooted distaste for any form of exercise beyond that which was required in the day’s work, most of the visiting between them devolved upon Nora.  To her the distance that separated the two houses was nothing, and as she had from the first taken a genuine liking to her neighbor she found herself going over to the Sharps’ several times a week.

When, as was natural at first, she felt discouraged over her little domestic failures, she found these neighborly visits a great tonic.  Mrs. Sharp was always ready to give advice when appealed to.  And unlike Gertie, she never expressed astonishment at her visitor’s ignorance, or impatience with her shortcomings.  These became more and more infrequent.  Nora made up for her total lack of experience by an intelligent willingness to be taught.  There was a certain stimulation in the thought that she was learning to manage her own house, that would have been lacking while at her brother’s even if Gertie had displayed a more agreeable willingness to impart her own knowledge.