Page:Stella Dallas, a novel (IA stelladallasnove00prou).pdf/195



Cornelius Morrison was always aware he was not the perfect mate for Helen, and Helen observed her marriage with wide-open and seeing eyes, they both did much to enrich and beautify the life of the other. All happy marriages are not "made in heaven," Helen discovered. Some are the result of wise human effort, and long steady adaptation.

Cornelius Morrison was thirty years older than Helen. He was never free from the fear that some day a younger man, a more appropriate comrade for his wife, might supplant him in her affections. If a younger man devoted an evening to Helen, if she seemed to respond to his attentions with interest and vivacity, a deep melancholy would take possession of Cornelius Morrison—unreasonable, perhaps, but uncontrollable and terribly painful.

Helen needed no explanations. With her intuition she saw as clearly as through a microscope into the reason for her husband's occasional waves of depression. Not for anything in the world would she hurt him. She might not love him in the romantic way that she had loved Stephen. She knew that she didn't; but there was something fine and untarnished to be preserved about their relations, beside which passing and personal pleasures were trivial and unimportant. She became as careful to spare