Olive Higgins Prouty

“ Kay Bird.
"My dear Mabel," Myrtle replied, "there's just a possibility a man who frequents corner saloons doesn't drink, but it's rather slight, I fear; and anyhow, whether he drinks or not, the fact that he enjoys the company and atmosphere of corner saloons is sufficient to bar him from certain drawing-rooms. Dear me, Mabel, haven't we all endured Stella Dallas years enough in this town to satisfy you? I, for one, don't enjoy torturing animals even though some of them don't seem to mind it very much. ”

“ There's no man living could get me really going now. It isn't your fault. It's Lollie's. It's that darned little Lollie's fault!" She brought out fiercely. "I'm no good for anything any more except to be her mother. I'm so crazy about Lollie that she uses up all the emotion I've got, so I'm just sort of dead ashes with everybody else in the world."
"You're alive enough for me."
But Stella was deaf to flattery now. "Ed," she exclaimed, "I simply worship Laurel!" ”

“ When Stella paid her bill of indebtedness to the proprietor of the boarding-house at Belcher's Beach, for allowing her to economize for a month on his property, it was with a feeling of triumph and with the comforting sense of a disagreeable job well done. There were those, however, who regarded Stella's sojourn in a different light. Stella was blissfully unaware that any one except Effie and Ed even knew of the sojourn, any one who had any connection with Milhampton. ”

“ That woman is in for a lot of disappointments when that child of hers she's always using, to boost herself into some sort of prominence, is older. The time has come, for her sake, as well as ours, to put an end to all further suffering. ”

“ A thing like that cannot be known about a woman, and countenanced, can it?"
"Certainly not," was the general dictum.
"I for one won't countenance it anyhow," announced Mrs. Kay Bird, with emphasis. "Either Mrs. Dallas moves out of the King Arthur or I do. I had to play bridge with her twice last winter!"
"And either her child is removed from Miss Fillibrown's or mine is," another voice proclaimed.
This conversation took place in Myrtle Holland's living-room a few days after her return to Milhampton, in late September. There were half a dozen women gathered round the tea-table. ”

“ And now she goes off with a man like that! Oh!"
"Such a woman doesn't deserve to have a child," exclaimed Mrs. Kay Bird, who had successfully avoided ever having had one herself.
4
Stella was safely in the haven of her two-rooms-and-a-bath at the King Arthur when she opened her mail. She had just come up from luncheon in the dining-room below, where she had greeted everybody she knew with her usual cordiality. "Be it even an apartment hotel, there's no place like home!" she had laughed to Mrs. Kay Bird. ”