Stella did not confide this particular economy of hers to Laurel. Laurel mustn’t know that her mother mixed up with such society. Stella didn’t in fact mix up with it, but Laurel mustn’t know that her mother slept under the same roof with people of that sort.

Laurel, at thirteen, was not a prolific letter-writer, but whatever messages she did send Stella she directed to the summer hotel, where she supposed her mother was to remain. These were forwarded by the clerk at the hotel, according to Stella’s instructions, to Milhampton, care of a certain Effie McDavitt. Stella didn’t object to Effie’s knowing about the cheap lodging-house—poor, worn-out, down-at-the-heel Effie. Effie was the only one of her girlhood friends whom Stella hadn’t managed to lose. She had tried to lose Effie. Had succeeded for a while, too, during the height of her social success in Milhampton. But Effie hadn’t stayed lost. Effie was the sort of woman whom you can grind your heel on the dirt and it won’t kill her loyalty. Like a worm. Cut her feelings of friendship for you in two, and the parts will still wriggle.

Of course Stella might have gone back to the little red cottage house outside Milhampton during Laurel’s absence and stayed with her father, if she could have endured the eccentricities of his old age and the lack of any attempt at a self-respecting existence. (He let the hens come right into the kitchen now, and he’d dragged his miserable bed in there, too—all rags, and no sheets.) And Stella could endure much to save a little money, but the danger of discovery was great. Ever since her marriage Stella had been struggling to cover up her early connections with the little red cottage house. She had an idea she had succeeded fairly well, too.

At Belcher’s Beach Stella never met anybody whom she knew, nor who knew her. It was only fifteen miles away from the big summer hotel where she and Laurel had spent the season, but it was an entirely different world. The guests from the big summer hotel never left the automobile highway, a half a mile inland, to seek out Belcher’s Beach. There was another amusement boulevard of bigger proportions and of less tawdry appearance a few miles farther on.

This wasn’t the first time Stella had successfully hidden herself at Belcher’s Beach, during Laurel’s absence. She had tested its advantages for some three or four years now. It had advantages. For one thing, it was near enough to Boston so that when the “dirt-commonness of the hole” got too unbearable she could dress up in her best clothes and escape to the Boylston Street shops without the price of the ticket hurting too much.