Page:Stella Dallas, a novel (IA stelladallasnove00prou).pdf/104

94 normal-school experience. He had dwelt with emphasis upon it when he had first written his sister Fanny in far-away Japan, about Stella.

It was another shock to Stephen to discover how little interest his precious resurrected library aroused in Stella. Once before they were married she had told him she would simply adore to live in a room with books to the ceiling! But her only passion, as far as books were concerned, seemed to be in their decorative quality. One day she spent three hours changing Stephen's careful arrangement of his books, so that all the bindings of one color should be grouped together, irrespective of subject. One evening, when Stephen started to read out loud to her from one of his favorite authors, in an attempt to lure her inside the books, she told him good-naturedly, for goodness' sake not to spout any more of that dead, old-fashioned, high-brow stuff to her. It gave her the fidgets.

She had no love at all for music, it appeared, although during the short period of their courtship she told Stephen she was "crazy about it," and in fact seemed to him to be. She was a beautiful dancer. "I just can't keep still when there's a tune going on." But after her first real musical concert with Stephen, one Saturday night several weeks after their marriage (Boston artists often came to Milhampton), she frankly confessed herself as horribly bored. A violin made her want to scream. It was so squeaky, like filing finger-nails with a steel file, she thought. Of course if musical concerts, Kneisel quartettes and the like were "the thing," she was game for them. But really a good