Page:Stella Dallas, a novel (IA stelladallasnove00prou).pdf/143

Rh "Has anything happened at school?"

"No."

"Who'd you play with at recess?"

"Nobody special."

"Did you play all alone?"

"No."

"Look here, Lollie. Answer me. Has somebody been horrid to you? Has somebody hurt your feelings?"

"No."

If Stella stared at her hard enough, probed long enough, Laurel might reply, "My stomach aches a little bit," and pay the price of two shredded wheat biscuit and no dessert for dinner.

It would never be from Laurel that Stella would get the first wind of a party in prospect from which Laurel was omitted. Laurel would never tell her that the girls in her class were meeting every few days at each other's houses to work for a fair, or to rehearse a play or fête in which she had no part. When information of an event of this sort did reach Stella, she knew then what had been the cause of Laurel's quiet, brown-study day a week ago. And yet she couldn't use her claws after all. It would be the worst policy in the worldworld. [sic] For the sake of Lollie's future, for that dim, far-away, full-of-promise time when Lollie would "come out" (girls "came out," now, in Milhampton), she must be as nice and purry as she knew how to the women she knew who could help her daughter.

Laurel could see through her mother's little shams and deceits, devised to spare her pain, much quicker than Stella could see through Laurel's. At thirteen