Page:Stella Dallas, a novel (IA stelladallasnove00prou).pdf/103

Rh to know. But he was different from the man he used to be. He required somebody different. Stephen did not want a girl to step down to him. Stephen did not want pity from the woman he married. Stella was not stepping down to him. Stella did not pity him.

When he first told her about his father, she replied, lightly, laughingly, "Mercy, I don't care what your father did, Stephen, nor your great-grandfather either." Then, with disarming honesty, "Gracious, you'd never have looked at poor me unless something had knocked you off your high horse."

No girl who belonged to Stephen's former existence would look upon a hundred and fifty dollars a month as a fortune. Stella did. Nor upon five rooms and a bath in an apartment house in the upper Webster Street district in Milhampton, as a palace. Stella did. Nor upon himself, dethroned, cast out, and disgraced, as still a prince. Stella did.

Stephen experienced no crude and sudden awakening. During the first year of their married life, there were surprises for him, gentle shocks almost every day, but nothing shattering. For instance, he was amazed to discover how little education a girl can absorb, and go through a high school and two years of normal school besides. Why, Stella didn't know Thackeray from George Eliot!

"Oh, I suppose I learned about those old fellows once, but you know how things of that sort slip in and out, unless they're dinged in everlastingly."

But didn't normal schools "ding in" such things? Apparently not. Stephen had been counting on the