Page:Stella Dallas, a novel (IA stelladallasnove00prou).pdf/251



sat in the big library-sort of room where Laurel had first watched her serve tea. She sat by one of the long windows that looked out upon the willow-shaded avenue that wound up to the front door; by the same window, it chanced, out of which she had run to meet Laurel the first time she had come to visit her four years ago. She was dressed very much as she had been then (it was morning and July), in white skirt and waist and low shoes. She sat in front of a desk, writing, in a dilatory fashion. Every little while she glanced back over her shoulder at the clock upon the mantel, then out the window down the willow-shaded drive, then back again to her pen.

Looking at Helen from the clock as she bent over her writing, she seemed not to have changed at all in the last four years, or in the last fourteen years; the same young-girl slenderness (not the slightest thickening of neck and shoulders, hip or ankle), the same young-girl lightness, as she sat poised on the edge of her chair, which was tilted forward on its two delicate front legs. But, when she raised her head, and looked back at the clock, then one saw without a shadow of doubt that she was no longer a girl. It wasn't only her hair (for in the last four years the few white threads Laurel had discovered had become a definite streak of silver