“I hope at least I haven’t a slave nature,” said Hilda.

“But perhaps you have! Perhaps you are a slave to your own idea of yourself.”

Hilda drove in silence for some time after this piece of unheard-of insolence from that chit Connie.

“At least I’m not a slave to somebody else’s idea of me: and the somebody else a servant of my husband’s,” she retorted at last, in crude anger.

“You see, it’s not so,” said Connie calmly.

She had always let herself be dominated by her elder sister. Now, though somewhere inside herself she was weeping, she was free of the dominion of other women . Ah! that in itself was a relief, like being given another life: to be free of the strange dominion and obsession of other women . How awful they were, women!