The elder daughter had been born at a time when her own activities were
at their height. As Portia herself had said, when she and her two
brothers were little, their mother had been too busy to--luxuriate in
them very much and during those early and possibly suggestible years,
Portia had been suffered to grow up, as it were, by herself. She was not
neglected, of course, and she was dearly loved. But when, for the first
time since actual babyhood, she got into the focal-plane of her mother's
mind again, there was a subtle, but, it seemed, ineradicable antagonism
between them, though that perhaps is too strong a word for it. A
difference there was, anyway, in the grain of their two minds, that
hindered unreserved confidences, no matter how hard they might try for
them. Portia's brusk disdain of rhetoric, her habit of reducing
questions to their least denominator of common sense, carried a constant
and perfectly involuntary criticism of her mother's ampler and more
emotional style--made her suspect that Portia regarded her as a
sentimentalist.

But Rose, with her first adorable smile, had captured her mother's heart
beyond the possibility of reservation or restraint. And, as the child
grew and her splendid, exuberant vitality and courage and wide-reaching,
though not facile, affection became marked characteristics, the hope
grew in her mother that here was a new leader born to the great Cause.
It would need new leaders. She herself was conscious of a side drift to
the great current, that threatened to leave her in a backwater. Or, as
she put it to herself, that threatened to sweep over the banks of
righteousness and decorum, and inundate, disastrously, the peaceful
fields.

She couldn't expect to have the strength to resist this drift herself,
but she had a vision of her daughter rising splendidly to the task. And