Page:Stella Dallas, a novel (IA stelladallasnove00prou).pdf/99

Rh as if she were tasting some new kind of candy. "Stephen." Then, "It's nice. I like it," she exclaimed and glanced up at Stephen from under her long lashes.

"Really? Do you?" Stephen had laughed, just a little disconcerted.

Stella liked the way he said, "Really?" and "Do you?" and later, "Delightful," and "Int'resting." He spoke like an actor on the stage, she thought.

When Stella discovered that her caller was a college graduate, and a college graduate from the same university which Harold Miller and Spencer Chisholm had attended, as well as a half-dozen other young Milhampton blue-bloods, who lived on the other side of the river, and whom Stella knew by sight and reputation, and by their fine houses on upper Webster Street, she was aware that this Mr. Dallas was the biggest opportunity she had ever had.

You might have thought she would have been a little awed, but Stella had confidence in her personal charms. Experience had convinced her that the same upward glances, intimacies, reservations, shynesses, boldnesses, what-not, were attractive to the genus "young man" whatever his species. When Stephen Dallas bade Stella good-bye that first night, he had held her willing hand a moment longer than is conventional and had asked if he could come again.

Later, when Stella went to bed, she tipped the little high square mirror on her bureau, well forward and gazing up into it, at her bare, fair expanse of gleaming neck and shoulders, she placed her