Ever since babyhood Rose had been devoted, by all her mother's plans and
hopes, to the furtherance of the cause of Woman, whose ardent champion
she herself had always been. For Rose--not Portia--was the devoted one.
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.
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