Page:Stella Dallas, a novel (IA stelladallasnove00prou).pdf/150

140 itself had slipped through the clouds. Her cup was full and brimming over. That precious relationship that she had lost so long ago, the day she was born when her mother died, had been given back to her again!

She spent two radiantly happy years with her daughter (Carol, she named her. It became the sweetest word in the English language to her), and then suddenly, with the arrow-like directness of a bolt of lightning from the skies, disease struck straight down into the holy of holies of her heart and killed her darling. By a mere accident the realization of her lifelong hope was broken into fragments—disintegrated into a thousand poignant little memories. Her little girl became a dream again, an ideal, a picture on ivory. "There were her boys." That is what people said in way of comfort. Yes, yes. Of course. Thank heaven she had her boys! But, oh, her boys must be made stalwart and bold, strong and tough-muscled. The image she would have modeled out of her bit of little-girl clay was to have been as graceful as poetry, as delicate as violin music, as perfect in detail, as fine and exquisite as an etching.

After Carol died, Helen Morrison offered her services to a certain charitable institution for working-girls in New York City. She was living in New York then. She had been living in New York ever since she married. She thought, perhaps, if something of the young and tender ideals she had had for Carol was given to other girls, then everything about her lovely baby would not remain in that state of undevelopment which hurt her so every time she looked at the miniature.