“You never can tell,” she said to Effie McDavitt. “It may be the best thing in the world that ever happened that there wasn’t any room for Laurel at Miss Fillibrown’s this year, and that I’ve got to get out of the King Arthur. I’d gotten into the way of thinking that the sun rose and set in Milhampton society. I’m going to take an apartment round Boston somewheres! A housekeeping apartment. Lollie is just crazy to have a home of our own, so she can ‘entertain,’ and I guess it’s high time. Mercy, I just wish I’d had sense enough to get out of Milhampton before. The town has always had it in for Laurel and me, ever since Stephen cleared out.”

Stella didn’t know anything about apartments in Boston. She didn’t know anything about where “the right place was to live,” nor “whom the right people were to know,” nor which was the “right church,” nor the “right school.” Her knowledge of Boston was confined to the shopping district.

“But that’s where this flare-up with Stephen comes in handy,” she told Effie. “Before I had to dig up a lawyer to defend me against that Morley Smith creature, I didn’t have a soul in Boston to ask advice about desirable locations, and desirable schools and things, that you have to know about to start right in any new place.”

Mr. Joseph Hinckly, of the firm of Hinckly, Jones, and Hinckly, became to Stella more than a mere legal adviser. His knowledge of Boston was somewhat confined too, although not to the same district as Stella’s. However, he never hesitated to give her an authoritative opinion on any subject if she asked for it. That was instinctive with him.

When Stella inquired, “Commonwealth Avenue’s one of the best residential streets, isn’t it?” he had assured her there was nothing to compare it with this side of Riverside Drive.

“Well, I’ve found an apartment on Commonwealth Avenue, way out beyond the thousands, and its front windows are just flooded with sunshine.”

“Snap it up quick,” exclaimed Mr. Hinckly. “The sunny side of Commonwealth Avenue! Great Scott! You can’t do better than that!”

Mr. Hinckly was fully aware that the distance between one and one thousand in some instances, in some streets, is as great as between one side of the globe and the other. (He himself had been born at the wrong end of a fashionable street, he once said in a political speech.) But he was also fully aware that his client might live in the very heart of the Back Bay and barriers more forbidding than space would prevent her from ever crossing its thresholds.