Queer, thought Stella, how the very sight of her present escort used to irritate Stephen. It would be interesting to Alfred Munn, she guessed, and flattering to him, too, if he had a notion how much he used to be discussed between Stephen and herself. Stephen was always making such queer mistakes about her little affairs, picking out somebody she really didn’t care a straw about, like Alfred Munn, for instance, to get stuffy over, and remaining undisturbed by the attentions from men who really interested her. Alfred Munn, indeed! A riding-teacher! That was what he had been, in Milhampton seven years ago. The smartest women in town took lessons with him. So did Stella. And the smartest women in town were keen about him, or pretended to be. Naturally they weren’t any of them seriously keen about Alfred Munn. The other women’s husbands understood. But Stephen wouldn’t. It was ridiculous, absurd. Stella told Stephen so dozens and dozens of times. But he would persist in making a mountain out of a molehill.

That was how Mrs. Holland described Stephen’s attitude. There was no woman in Milhampton more the fashion than Mrs. Holland at that time. Stella had been immensely pleased by her friendship. Every word she uttered was to Stella like the wisdom of an oracle.

“Husbands need a lot of training, my dear,” she had told Stella after a burst of confidences from Stella one afternoon. “Don’t let yourself become a doormat. Husbands don’t respect doormats, in the long run. Teach him that you can look at another man without wanting to elope with him. And get him used to the idea that you aren’t blind to every other masculine creature in the world but himself. Such an attitude keeps them lovers, makes them alert, attentive, my dear.”

But it didn’t seem to make Stephen a lover. It didn’t make Stephen alert and attentive. It worked just the other way with him.

3

THESE REFLECTIONS DID not possess Stella in the theater. It was later, alone on the train, returning to her beach hotel that she glanced into her past. She didn’t allow herself to do so frequently. It didn’t make her any happier. Things had been so rosy, so promising ten years ago—so far beyond her most extravagant girlhood dreams. And now—now! Resolutely she turned her thoughts to other things. She was to meet Alfred Munn again the following Saturday for lunch and another matinee. What should she wear? The sudden necessity of a new early-fall hat gave her a little thrill of delight.