No girl who belonged to Stephen’s former existence would look upon a hundred and fifty dollars a month as a fortune. Stella did. Nor upon five rooms and a bath in an apartment hour in the upper Webster Street district in Milhampton, as a palace. Stella did. Nor upon himself, dethroned, cast out, and disgraced, as still a prince. Stella did.

Stephen experienced no crude and sudden awakening. During the first year of their married life, there were surprises for him, gentle shocks almost every day, but nothing shattering. For instance, he was amazed to discover how little education a girl can absorb, and go through a high school and two years of normal school besides. Why, Stella didn’t know Thackeray from George Eliot!

“Oh, I suppose I learned about those old fellows once, but you know how things of that sort slip in and out, unless they’re dinged in ever-lastingly.”

But didn’t normal schools “ding in” such things? Apparently not. Stephen had been counting on the normal-school experience. He had dwelt with emphasis upon it when he had first written his sister Fanny in far-away Japan, about Stella.

It was another shock to Stephen to discover how little interest his precious resurrected library aroused in Stella. Once before they were married she had told him she would simply adore to live in a room with books to the ceiling! But her only passion, as far as books were concerned, seemed to be in their decorative quality. One day she spent three hours changing Stephen’s careful arrangement of his books, so that all the bindings of one color should be grouped together, irrespective of subject. One evening, when Stephen started to read out loud to her from one of his favorite authors, in an attempt to lure her inside the books, she told him good-naturedly, for goodness’ sake not to spout any more of that dead, old-fashioned, high-brow stuff to her. It gave her the fidgets.