“Why,” she said, “Ed bores me. He never gave me a thrill in his life. Oh, Milhampton makes me sick! Narrow-minded, evil-minded, nasty-minded, I think. I’ll tell you just how it was. I was down there in Boston, for two days, shopping, getting favors and things for Lollie’s party. Naturally, when Ed suggested that he run down and take me to the theater in the evening, I was pleased to pieces. Wouldn’t you be? I love the theater in Boston. We didn’t stay at the same hotel, though for the life of me I don’t see why we shouldn’t. There were a hundred or so other men staying there. Glory, how I hate all this winking and shoulder-shrugging stuff about hotels and bedrooms! When Ed suggested, after the theater, that he drop around and have breakfast with me, why, I said, ‘Sure, Mike,’ quick as a wink. It never entered my head but what that was all right. I didn’t care if somebody from Milhampton did see me. Married woman like me! Breakfast! Right in a public dining-room! What’s there so horrible about that, I’d like to know! I didn’t want anything of Ed but a little fun, and a little advertising. When Stephen wrote to me in that icebergy way of his, and asked if I would like my freedom so as to be able to marry Alfred Munn, I could have screamed! Marry Ed? Why, I’d commit suicide first. I don’t want to marry Ed! Hasn’t anybody any understanding of the human animal? A woman can have other reasons for liking a little attention than just the one the shady stories are all based on. I’m no worn-out old man whose appetite for everything but just indecency has gone dead. I like a little dinner and theater-party just for fun’s sake. Honestly, Effie, sometimes I think I’m the only one who’s got a clean mind in this town.”

Stella took rooms, for the season, at a fashionable hotel on the coast of Maine that summer. She had never spent a summer at a hotel. It might prove diverting. She certainly needed something diverting, she thought. But whatever it proved, the arrow of direction pointed her out of Milhampton for a while.