Page:Stella Dallas, a novel (IA stelladallasnove00prou).pdf/145

Rh was she never asked to lunch, or to spend the night? Why had she been dropped from the Widow's Mite Club which met Saturday mornings at Stephanie Holland's? The worldly-wise little girls at school could have told her.

"It's your mother."

"What's the matter with my mother?" she would have asked, surprised. Laurel thought her mother beautiful. The little girls would have shrugged and said, "Our mothers don't 'know her. "With just the same shrug and inflection that had silenced them.

But Laurel never asked questions of the little girls. She passed through her childhood blindfolded, picking her way cautiously along, sensitive finger-tips stretched out before her to avoid sharp corners and unyielding walls, clinging close to the protection of solitude and isolation.

There were other questions besides those connected with social values to which she didn't know the answers, big questions like, what becomes of dead people, and what God is like, and if He really hears you pray, and knows when a bird falls out of a nest, and where babies come from, and what doctors carry in their mysterious leather bags, and how kittens are born, and if there was ever actually a George Washington, and a Polyphemus, and a Jesus Christ, and a Noah, and a Noah's Ark, with a pair of every kind of animal there is in it, even a pair of mosquitoes, and why there had to be a pair.

Laurel never asked her mother questions about big things. She had discovered that her mother always changed the subject ever so quickly if she did.