Page:Stella Dallas, a novel (IA stelladallasnove00prou).pdf/161

Rh woman is in for a lot of disappointments when that child of hers she's always using, to boost herself into some sort of prominence, is older. The time has come, for her sake, as well as ours, to put an end to all further suffering."

"The child seems quite a nice little thing."

"But how long will she stay quite a nice little thing with a mother like that? Really, Mabel!"

"And nice little thing or not," spoke up somebody from the other side of the hearth, "I'm sure I don't want my son meeting her at dances, and things, as he grows up, and run the risk of having him fall in love with a girl with such a mother!"

"Oh, isn't it sad?" deplored Phyllis Stearns, with a sanctimonious sigh, "that women exist who care so little for their children as Stella Dallas? I used to know her very slightly, when she was first married, and before her child was ever born she didn't want her. And now she goes off with a man like that! Oh!"

"Such a woman doesn't deserve to have a child," exclaimed Mrs. Kay Bird, who had successfully avoided ever having had one herself.

was safely in the haven of her two-rooms-and-a-bath at the King Arthur when she opened her mail. She had just come up from luncheon in the dining-room below, where she had greeted everybody she knew with her usual cordiality. "Be it even an apartment hotel, there's no place like home!" she had laughed to Mrs. Kay Bird. "Gracious, but this place seems good to me!" she had thrown