-she'll need to be reassured about every day.
Doubt of it is the one thing that will have the power to make her
bitterly unhappy. That's why it seems to me so terribly necessary that
she be sure about it before it's too late."

"Yes, of course," said Rose. "But that's true of the man, too, isn't it?
Otherwise, where's the equality?"

Her mother couldn't answer that except with a long sigh.

Strangely enough, it wasn't until after Rose had gone away, and she had
shut herself up in her room to think, that any other aspect of the
situation occurred to her--even that there was another aspect of it
which she'd naturally have expected to be the first and only critical
one.

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.

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 p