Page:Stella Dallas, a novel (IA stelladallasnove00prou).pdf/189

Rh game in New Haven last November, and the boat-race on the Thames last June, and the plays they had seen last spring in New York, and the places they had dined and danced there; and Shaw and Ibsen and Arnold Daly and Nazimova. It was a typical call for that era. Helen had carried on conversations of the same sort with many a young man before. But never had her hands been cold, and her face hot, and never had she lain awake afterwards for three hours and a half.

The truth was that Helen, with the same unerring instinct that later guided her in recognizing kinships between objects of art, was aware of something of the sort between Stephen and herself on her first evening alone with him, and it was exciting. It wasn't only that they were both young, with traditions that were not dissimilar, and tastes and ideals that were not antagonistic. For such was the case between Helen and many of the young men she had met. It was something deeper, more vital. Why, even when this Stephen disagreed with her, now and again, as he had that first evening, she had experienced as sharp—as glowing a sense of pleasure, as certain sharp contrasts in color gave her. No. It wasn't that Stephen was like her, any more like her than a cup is like a saucer (but one without the other is incomplete—broken) or the tallow candle like the silver stick to hold it (but one is the perfect complement of the other, even though made of such different stuff).

Stephen also had been awake a good many hours of the night after his first call on Helen. He wouldn't have been, probably, if he had been in his