Stephen stared at the little dress, amazed. Why, six weeks ago Stella had declared she wouldn’t take a stitch for the baby! He couldn’t refrain from reminding her of that.

“Well, what of it?” she shrugged. “I said all sorts of things then, in the beginning, when I was scared, I suppose. Oh, Stephen,” she laughed good-naturedly, “you don’t know beans about women. Why, I’m getting quite crazy about the baby now!”

Stephen looked at her sharply. Did the maternal instinct come alive suddenly in some women, like that?

“Really?”

“Certainly,” she assured him lightly. “Of course it will tie me down, terribly, for a while, but Myrtle says” (she was constantly quoting Myrtle to Stephen), “Myrtle says I’d be awfully out of things in the long run, if I didn’t ever have a child. All the young married set talk babies—at least the women; and, after all, it is sort of fun to dress the cunning little things up, and send them out rolling, with a nurse-girl. Myrtle has got a baby. She dresses her in darling things, and Phyllis” (Phyllis was often quoted to Stephen, too) “told me something is going to happen to her next summer. I’m really quite in the swim.”

Stephen turned away, no longer dismayed. Only a little more disillusioned.

2

LAUREL WAS BORN in June. Stephen named her Laurel—at least it was the name he applied to her the first time he saw her. He had come across some clumps of mountain-laurel in bud a day or two before, when out on one of his long tramps. The buds were clusters of sticky little spurs of deep pink and red. The first morning the trained nurse brought Laurel to Stephen for inspection, the baby was wrapped up in layers upon layers of flannel. Only the tip of her little pink head was showing.

“Hello, you little mountain-laurel bud,” Stephen had said to her, at a loss to know what to say.

He never would have called her a laurel-bud again. It was the nurse who insisted upon the term. Every morning when she took the baby to Stephen for inspection (a ceremony she never failed to perform), she remarked, “Here’s your little mountain-laurel bud, Mr. Dallas!”

Laurel’s real name was Hildegarde—it was as Hildegarde that she was enrolled on the city’s records—but she was never called anything but Laurel and “Lollie,” and something “Lolliepops.” Myrtle Holland had suggested Hildegarde to Stella. It was a name that had style and distinction, she had said. Stella fully intended to adopt it as soon as Lollie was old enough to go to school, she had ideas of her own upon the subject. She didn’t like Hildegarde.

“It’s big and ugly, and has corners,” she announced.

3