Page:Stella Dallas, a novel (IA stelladallasnove00prou).pdf/159

Rh Belcher's Beach. On the second visit they had been almost as excited as on their first. They had seen Ed Munn and Stella Dallas again! The pair were leaving the boarding-house this time! It was eleven in the morning! It looked pretty bad, didn't it?

It looked still worse when Mrs. Holland called at the fashionable hotel, where Mrs. Kay Bird had heard Stella Dallas was spending the season, and discovered that Mrs. Dallas hadn't been there for three weeks! And that her forwarding address was care of a Mrs. Effie McDavitt, in a very queer part of Milhampton, way down by the mills somewhere. Obviously Stella Dallas had done her best to cover up her tracks. Oh, wasn't it all too shocking for anything?

"Probably those two have been carrying on their little affair, off and on, ever since the scandal about them when her husband left her. I wouldn't believe then that she'd really gone the limit (I'm always slow at jumping to conclusions of that sort); but now, I do not see that we can very well help thinking the worst. My husband says that Belcher's Beach is full of questionable places. He didn't care to go into an investigation of that particular one, but you could see by looking at it—so dirty, and run-down, and ramshackle—and by observing the women who came out of it, what sort of a place it was. Stella Dallas herself looked a little more common and ordinary than ever—paint just piled on, and that riding-teacher—Munn—has degenerated terribly. Oh, it makes my blood boil to think that the mother of one of the girls, with whom our daughters associate daily at the little private school