experience. She had made the resolution to remember nothing of Gertie's
humble origin, to treat her in every way with the deference due her
brother's wife.

Gertie, too, had made good resolutions. She was at heart the more
generous nature of the two. She was prepared to find her husband's
sister unskilled to the point of incompetency in all the housewifely
lore of which she was past mistress; for she, too, had her traditions.
She would have laughed at the idea that it was possible for her to be
jealous of anybody. But secretly she knew that there was one thing which
aroused in her a frenzy of jealous rage; that was those years of her
husband's life in which she had neither part nor lot. Any reference to
his old life 'at home' fairly maddened her.

And deep down in her heart, each woman nursed a grievance. With Gertie
it was the remembrance of the angry letter of protest which Nora had
written her brother when she learned of his approaching marriage and
which he had been indiscreet enough to show her; with Nora, it was the
recollection of Gertie's laugh the night of her arrival when her
brother's hired servant had dared to take her for a moment in his arms.

Still, any open rupture might have been avoided or at least delayed for
several months longer, if either could have been persuaded to exercise a
little more patience and self-control. Each of them, in her different
way, had known adversity. Both of them had had to learn to control
tempers naturally high while they were still dependent. But it never
occurred to either of them that the obligation to do so still existed.

From Gertie's point of view, Nora was just as much a dependent as in the
days when she was a hired companion to a rich woman. It was her house in