Page:Stella Dallas, a novel (IA stelladallasnove00prou).pdf/41

Rh thought her utterly bored by them. She was a polite little creature. She had never said she didn't like them, but after the first half-hour or so in a gallery, she usually made inquiry as to how much longer they were going to stay.

"I didn't know you liked picture galleries, Laurel," he said to her later, seated at a little table beside a trickling fountain with goldfish and twinkling lights—blue and pink and yellow—shining in its depths, and tinkling Hawaiian music sounding from somewhere in the distance. "You never said you did."

"I didn't know it until lately," said Laurel. "It came to me all in a flash. You know how liking things does come in a flash sometimes."

"No. Tell me."

He was fearfully afraid she wouldn't. She was like the gray-tailed squirrels in the park in some ways, at times ready to be friendly and intimate, and at other times shy of him, and as timid as a chipmunk.

"Well, the first time I knew I liked the woods,"—Ah! one of her trustful moods—"wasn't when I was up there in them, but right in a city street, looking into an art-store window at a picture of a trail just like lots of trails we've tramped. It flashed over me right there on the crowded city sidewalk, 'I just love the woods!' And last winter our teacher took our class at school to an art gallery one afternoon, and when I got the first queer smell, and heard the first echo-y sounds that go with art galleries, it came over me what fun we'd had picking out our favorite pictures in art galleries here in New York, and