In this close contact, and in what the town supposed to be intimacy, these two women, rapidly approaching middle age, lived and worked together. The town would have been dumbfounded had it known that Nancy Bodkin never had asked her new partner one word concerning her life previous to her advent into the partnership. Conversely, Marcia had respected the little milliner. They had simply begun life with the hour of their meeting and gone forward to the best of their combined ability. Neither of them had seemed inclined to be communicative concerning herself, and each of them had too much inherent refinement to engage in a business that a popular poet of their day graphically described as the “picking open of old sores.” If either of them had an old sore, she was depending wholeheartedly upon the other to help her in concealing it. In breaking away from the years of her life with Martin Moreland, Marcia had followed an impulse. In her heart she had always known that this thing would happen some day. She had steeled herself from the very beginning against Jason. She did not want to love him; she did not want him to love her. When the day of separation came, as she always had felt that it would, she figured upon reducing the pain of it to the minimum. Exactly what she felt concerning the boy was a secret locked in her heart. Freed of his presence and his influence, she found that the greatest feeling possessing her concerning Martin Moreland was a feeling of fear. Twice she had witnessed his brutality toward Jason when to her it was without sufficient reason. She realized that any day the same storm of wrath might break upon her head for as small cause. When the sudden resolve had come to her, after the injustice of being picked up bodily and forcibly without her consent or approval and set down among strangers in a strange town, there had developed suddenly in her heart a storm of rebellion that had ended in her seeking refuge and independence with Nancy Bodkin. She had no idea what Martin Moreland would do when he went to the house to which he had sent her, with the expectation in his heart that he would find at least one room of it to his liking and warm with the reception to which he was accustomed. She had thought that he would come to the store, and in the daze of the early weeks of her transplantation, she had lifted a set face and a combative eye every time a hand was laid upon the latch.