“I’ll give the mud-slingers in this town a rest for a month or two,” she said to Effie. “By the end of the summer perhaps their muck will have all dried up. Of course, it would be rather nice if I could fall into some harmless, but showy ‘little affair’ this summer, with some attractive gentleman or other, up there at that fashionable hotel. That would prove there wasn’t anything serious in this Alfred Munn business. It would be rather nice, too, if some of the cats in this town could hear that I was having a wonderful time this summer—being taken right into all sorts of inner circles, and select groups. Oh, there are lots of possibilities in this summer hotel scheme of mine, Effie, my dear.”

Stella equipped Laurel with a dozen new frocks, replenished her own wardrobe, and, stout-heartedly, set forth to new fields and untried country, in search of fresh laurels with which to cover up the dried and dead ones.

That was the beginning of her summer hotel era. In the fall, not even Effie was told, in detail, of the disheartening experiences of the first experiment.

“You can drill forever for oil in some places, but unless oil is there, it won’t do you any good,” was how Stella briefly summed it up. “Next summer, I’ll try the Cape—or the mountains possibly.”

Stella didn’t go back to the detached house when she returned from Maine. Instead she took two-rooms-and-a-bath in an apartment hotel that had lately been built in a residential section of Milhampton.

The apartment hotel offered her more companionship than the detached house. There would at least be the necessity of getting out of a kimono when you went down to meals. Besides, she could have people to dinner more safely. The invaluable Hedwig, whom Stephen had engaged six years ago, and taught and trained, had left to be married. Stella was afraid to trust a new servant with all the hard-and-fast rules. In an apartment hotel, all you had to do, if anything went wrong, was to shrug and say, “Oh, dear, isn’t the service in this place dreadful?”

Moreover, there were social advantages. The King Arthur (that was the name of the new apartment hotel) was to be patronized by what Stella called “the right people.” She needed all the advantages that she could get from close proximity to the right people.

Stella was determined not to let her injury of the preceding spring incapacitate her. It isn’t always necessary for a man to go to bed and stay there even if there is a bullet embedded in him somewhere. Stella wasn’t going to become a social invalid just because she’d been unfortunate and the target of a little disagreeable gossip.