Page:Stella Dallas, a novel (IA stelladallasnove00prou).pdf/206

196 wife?) Stephen closed his eyes an instant. Stella, powdered, painted, perfumed, coarsened in speech and manner as he didn't suppose it possible, her fattened figure covered with cheap trappings from head to toe, flashed into his field of vision. He looked down at Helen's lovely hand. Stella and Helen were as unlike as a wax figure, with highly colored cheeks, glass eyes, and blond hair, is unlike a statue of a beautiful Diana carved in white marble.

"You saw her?"

"Yes, I saw her."

There was another pause.

Gently Helen withdrew her arm and got up. Of course as long as she sat so close to Stephen he could not talk to her. She shoved up her little armchair opposite him and sat down in it.

"Now, Stephen, tell me about it."

Tell her about it? Repeat to her the threat Stella had hurled at him? No! Helen must never surmise that her fair name had been mentioned, even by an unscrupulous lawyer as a corespondent in a divorce case. For such had been the nature of Stella's threat.

It had been torture to Stephen to sit in Stella's presence and listen to her using Helen's name familiarly, daring to refer to her in the same breath that she referred to Alfred Munn. Stephen closed his eyes again an instant. He could hear Stella still. Her speech had grown terribly crude with the years.

"Thank heaven for lawyers, I say now. Gracious! I'd never have thought myself of getting something on you, Stephen, but my lawyer has been right onto his job. He's been down there to New