Page:Stella Dallas, a novel (IA stelladallasnove00prou).pdf/216

206 with this gentle child filled Laurel with timid happiness for a whole afternoon.

But when she told her mother about the conversation, Stella had exclaimed, "Heavens, we can't know those people, Laurel. They're foreigners! So is the family above us. I've discovered this place is riddled with them. Mr. Hinckly couldn't have known what he was talking about! We've simply got to get out sooner or later."

Until Stella moved to Boston, Laurel had preferred a tramp in the country, or a call on Jake, or Tony, or peg-legged Eddy, to the movies; or a stolen pilgrimage to the little house that used to be red, where the mysterious old man whom she must never tell was her grandfather lived, to a vaudeville or play. But in her new solitude, where there was no place to go and nowhere to call, Laurel looked with interest upon the diverting interior of any amusement place.

She went to the movies with her mother three times a week regularly. They climbed to gallery seats at Keith's every time the bill was changed. On Saturday nights Stella and Laurel usually dressed up in their best clothes, and dined at a fashionable hotel, ordering the lowest-priced entrée on the bill, dawdling over their bread and butter, as they observed the gay parties about them, and watched the waiters bear in marvelous planked steaks and Peach Melbas.

It was a bleak and forlorn sort of an existence for both mother and child, and terribly shorn of human contacts. But it needn't have been quite so bleak and forlorn and shorn, Stella said, if Laurel hadn't