Page:Stella Dallas, a novel (IA stelladallasnove00prou).pdf/139

Rh that she could get from close proximity to the right people.

Stella was determined not to let her injury of the preceding spring incapacitate her. It isn't always necessary for a man to go to bed and stay there even if there is a bullet embedded in him somewhere. Stella wasn't going to become a social invalid just because she'd been unfortunate and the target of a little disagreeable gossip.

Alfred Munn had left Milhampton by the time Stella and Laurel returned from Maine. He had gone into another business in another city. Somebody else had taken over the horses. In time people would forget about Ed. Bullet wounds heal. Scars can be covered up. Of course it was a handicap not to have a husband if he was still in the land of the living; at least it was a handicap in Milhampton, Massachusetts. In California single married women were as plentiful as sunshine, and as welcome, Stella had heard—Oh, she did wish it had been in some place in California that she and Stephen had happened to put down their roots. But it couldn't be helped. It was only common sense, of course, to keep on growing in the same place where they'd started. Stella appreciated her own limitations to the extent of realizing that it would be difficult, even in California, to work her way up alone to anything like the position that she had attained with Stephen in Milhampton.

When Stephen's business took him to New York, Laurel was enrolled as a pupil in the exclusive school of the community. She attended the exclusive dancing-class, and she attended the exclusive