She had no love at all for music, it appeared, although during the short period of their courtship she told Stephen she was “crazy about it,” and in fact seemed to him to be. She was a beautiful dancer. “I just can’t keep still when there’s a tune going on.” But after her first real musical concert with Stephen, one Saturday night several weeks after their marriage (Boston artists often came to Milhampton), she frankly confessed herself as horribly bored. A violin made her want to scream. It was so squeaky, like filing finger-nails with a steel file, she thought. Of course if musical concerts, Kneisel quartettes and the like were “the thing,” she was game for them. But really a good vaudeville show (movies were then in their infancy) was much more entertaining. And a good play, where you saw modern actors, kept you so much better up-to-date, and rubbed the green moss off you in rolls. The beauty of out-of-doors had no attraction for her, not flowers either, her morning-glories and wild-cucumbers notwithstanding. She spent a good deal of time outdoors, walking; not, however, for the physical exhilaration of it, but simply “to reduce” (even then Stella was inclined to be a little plump) or to save the price of a car-fare, which she usually invested in candy. She was always nibbling at candy.

Often during the first few months of his marriage, grave doubts and misgivings assailed Stephen, but he was able to send them slinking away usually by comparing his present existence with that of a year ago. A year ago his evenings had been awful stretches of loneliness and unloveliness. Now each night there was a very pretty and always good-natured Stella waiting for him in a little sweet-smelling apartment; and after his evening meal there were distant sounds, far from unpleasing to him, of running water and rattling dishes, as he sat smoking and reading in his old Morris chair, wrapped round with his books and his rugs and a few treasured pieces of furniture unburied from a storehouse in Reddington.

Later, there was somebody sitting on the arm of his Morris chair, pressing against his shoulder, somebody soft and warm and alive, and his—all his, to do with as he pleased. No; he was not sorry that he had married Stella.

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