'Are there seven of you?'
'Me and Sid and five little ones. If that don't make seven, I've forgotten all the 'rithmetic I ever learned,' said Mrs. Sharp briefly. 'And let me tell you, you who're just starting in, that having children out here on the prairie half the time with no proper care, and particularly in winter, when maybe you're snowed up and the doctor can't get to you, ain't my idea of a bank holiday.'
'I shouldn't think it would be,' said Nora, sincerely shocked, although she found it difficult to hide a smile at her visitor's comparison; bank holidays being among her most horrid recollections.
Mrs. Sharp, despite a rather emphatic manner which softened noticeably as her visit progressed, turned out to be a stout, red-faced woman of middle age who seemed to be troubled with a chronic form of asthma. She was as unmistakably English as her husband. But like him, she had lost much of her native accent, although occasionally one caught a faint trace of the Cockney. She had two rather keen brown eyes which, as she talked, took in the room to its smallest detail.
'Well, I declare, I think you've done wonders considering you've only had a day and not used to work like this,' she said heartily. 'When Sid told me that Frank was bringing home a wife I said to myself: 'Well, I don't envy her
'You don't seem to have a very high opinion of men's ability in the domestic line,' said Nora with a smile.
'I can tell you just how high it is,' said Mrs. Sharp with decision. 'I would just as soon think of consultin' little Sid--an' he's goin' on three--about the housekeepin' as I would his father. It ain't a man's work. Why should he know anything about it?'
'Still,' demurred Nora, 'lots of men look after themselves somehow.'
'Somehow's just the word; they never get beyond that. Of course I knew Frank would be sure to marry some day. And with his good looks it's a wonder he didn't do so long ago. Most girls is so crazy about a good-lookin' fellow that they never stop to think if he has anything else to him. Not that he hasn't lots of good traits, I don't mean that. But,' she added shrewdly, 'you don't look like the silly sort that would be taken in by good looks alone.'
'No,' said Nora dryly, 'I don't think I am.'
After that, until the two men returned, they talked of household matters, and Nora found that her new neighbor had a store of useful and practical suggestions to make, and, what was even better, seemed glad to place all her experience at her disposal in the kindliest and most friendly manner possible, entirely free from any trace of that patronage which had so maddened her in her sister-in-law.
'Now mind you,' called Mrs. Sharp, as she laboriously climbed up to the seat beside her husband as they were driving away, 'if Frank, here, gets at all upish--and he's pretty certain to, all newly married men do--you come to me. I'll settle him, never fear.'
Frank laughed a little over-loudly at this parting shot, and Nora noticed that for some time after their guests had gone, he seemed unusually silent.
As for the Sharps, they also maintained an unwonted silence--which for Mrs. Sharp, at least, was something unusual--until they had arrived at their own door.
'Well?' queried Sharp, as they were about to turn in.
'It beats me,' replied his wife. 'Why, she's a lady. But she'll come out all right,' she finished enigmatically, 'she's got the right stuff in her, poor dear!'
In after years, when Nora was able to look back on this portion of her life and see things in just perspective, she always felt that she could never be too thankful that her days had been crowded with occupation. Without that, she must either have gone actually insane, or, in a frenzy of helplessness, done some rash thing which would have marred her whole life beyond repair.
After she found herself growing more accustomed to her new life--and, after all, the growing accustomed to it was the hardest part--she realized that she was only following the universal law of
