Olive Higgins Prouty

“ Stella was determined not to let her injury of the preceding spring incapacitate her. It isn't always necessary for a man to go to bed and stay there even if there is a bullet embedded in him somewhere. Stella wasn't going to become a social invalid just because she'd been unfortunate and the target of a little disagreeable gossip.
Alfred Munn had left Milhampton by the time Stella and Laurel returned from Maine. He had gone into another business in another city. Somebody else had taken over the horses. In time people would forget about Ed. Bullet wounds heal. Scars can be covered up. ”

“ Hasn't anybody any understanding of the human animal? A woman can have other reasons for liking a little attention than just the one the shady stories are all based on. I'm no worn-out old man whose appetite for everything but just indecency has gone dead. I like a little dinner and theater-party just for fun's sake. Honestly, Effie, sometimes I think I'm the only one who's got a clean mind in this town."
Stella took rooms, for the season, at a fashionable hotel on the coast of Maine that summer. ”

“ She could deceive her mother without flickering an eyelash, and could repeat to strangers the little white lies Stella taught her, with the finesse of a woman of the world, but at school in her work and play, she was never anything but strictly honest.
As experienced as Laurel was in certain of the world's cruelties, and as mature in her calm manner of acceptance of whatever befell, she was amazingly young and innocent about many of the facts of life. Another antithesis. Much younger and much more innocent than the group of sophisticated little girls in her class at school. ”

“ When Stephen's business took him to New York, Laurel was enrolled as a pupil in the exclusive school of the community. She attended the exclusive dancing-class, and she attended the exclusive Sunday-school. Stella belonged to a few helpful organizations herself. Her name was in the Blue Book. She had at least a bowing acquaintance with almost everybody "worth-while." She had lots of men friends. She believed she had quite a few women friends of value. ”

“ There were other questions besides those connected with social values to which she didn't know the answers, big questions like, what becomes of dead people, and what God is like, and if He really hears you pray, and knows when a bird falls out of a nest, and where babies come from, and what doctors carry in their mysterious leather bags, and how kittens are born, and if there was ever actually a George Washington, and a Polyphemus, and a Jesus Christ, and a Noah, and a Noah's Ark, with a pair of every kind of animal there is in it, even a pair of mosquitoes, and why there had to be a pair. ”