With her head teeming with all the new ideas that Mrs. Sharp’s experiences furnished, Nora felt that the time was by no means as wasted as she had once thought it would be.  There was no reason, after all, that she should sink to the level of a mere domestic drudge.  And if this part of her life was not to endure forever, it would not have been entirely barren, since it furnished her with much new material to ponder over.  After all, was it really more narrow than her life at Tunbridge Wells?  In her heart, she acknowledged that it was not.

To Frank, also, the winter brought a broader outlook.  He had looked upon Nora’s little refinements of speech and delicate point of view, when he had first known her at her brother’s, as finicky, to say the least.  All women had fool notions about most things; this one seemed to have more than the average share, that was all.  He secretly shared Gertie’s opinion that women the world over were all alike in the essentials.  He had always been of the opinion that Nora had good stuff in her which would come out once she had been licked into shape.  Yet he found himself not only learning to admire her for those same niceties but found himself unconsciously imitating her mannerisms of speech.

Then, too, after they began the habit of reading in the evenings, he found that she had no intention of ridiculing his ignorance and lack of knowledge in matters on which she seemed to him to be wonderfully informed.  That they did not by any means always agree in the conclusions they arrived at, in place of irritating him, as he would have thought, he found only stimulating to his imagination.  To attack and try to undermine her position, as long as their arguments were conducted with perfect good nature on either side, as they always were, diverted him greatly.  And he was secretly pleased when she defended herself with a skill and address that defeated his purpose.

All the little improvements in the shack were a source of never-ending pride and pleasure to him.  Often when at work he found himself proudly comparing his place with its newly added prettiness with the more gaudy ornaments of Mrs. Sharp’s or even with Gertie’s more pretentious abode.  And it was not altogether the pride of ownership that made them suffer in the comparison.

Looking back on the days before Nora’s advent seemed like a horrible nightmare from which he was thankful to have awakened.  Once in a while he indulged himself in speculating as to how it would feel to go back to the old shiftless, untidy days of his bachelorhood.  But he rarely allowed himself to entertain the idea of her leaving, seriously.  He was like a child, snuggly tucked in his warm bed who, listening to the howling of the wind outside, pictures himself exposed to its harshness in order to luxuriate the more in its warmth and comfort.

But when, as sometimes happened, he could not close the door of his mind to the thought of how he should ever learn to live without her again, it brought an anguish that was physical as well as mental.  Once, looking up from her book, Nora had surprised him sitting with closed eye, his face white and drawn with pain.