Page:Stella Dallas, a novel (IA stelladallasnove00prou).pdf/39

Rh music too. Some of the symphonies, he told her, were just fairy tales told by violins, harps, French horns, and tambourines. Before a concert he took great pains to explain to Laurel the story which the various instruments were going to tell her. She would listen to his explanation fast enough, but more likely than not would fall asleep during the symphony itself.

When she was eleven years old, Stephen arranged to have Laurel visit him during the winter season, and took her for the first time to grand opera; also he took her, that same year, to several Shakesperian plays; to a beautifully staged classic for children; to a lovely fairy-like performance of dancing; all the while trying to place before her beauty in whatever form. When they were in the woods together, following a trail, helping the guides to make camp, cutting balsam boughs, gathering firewood, sitting for long hours in a boat on some lovely lake, listening for bird-calls, watching for a deer to steal down to the water's edge to drink, it was beauty in its natural form, then, that Stephen Dallas was placing before Laurel. He himself bought the clothes that Laurel wore on these trips of theirs into the woods. He took the keenest delight in selecting the rough little flannel shirts, the khaki trousers, and stout boots, visiting sporting-shop after sporting-shop before he was satisfied.

"I never saw so devoted a father as you, Stephen Dallas," one of his women friends said to him one day, during one of Laurel's visits. He had been refusing all his invitations.

Stephen Dallas had smiled and shrugged in reply.