Her defeat was gradual. She lost ground by degrees. Her various points of vantage and fortresses of strength fell slowly. This season she failed to receive an announcement of the Current Events Class; next season, her name appeared to have been dropped from the Charity Ball list. The season after, the small Luncheon Club she belonged to was reorganized and she was omitted. Every year there were personal slights of various kinds, coolnesses, intentional inattentions from all quarters. Laughing—bitterly, too—she told herself that the people in Milhampton must be having some sort of chronic eye difficulty. So many old friends and acquaintances failed to recognize her, lately. But Stella didn’t lose hope. She didn’t, anyhow, show that she lost hope. She managed to keep her eyes bright, and her lips smiling, and her head erect, in spite of repeated rebukes.

“Why, I’ve got to. For Lollie’s sake,” she said. “Lollie mustn’t know her mother has got anything to look sour-faced over. Oh, we’ll be all right after a while—Lollie and me,” she told Effie McDavitt. “We’ll come out on top in the end. You watch us.”

2

IT WAS ALWAYS “Lollie and me,” always “we,” and “us,” by that time. Stella didn’t even think in the singular number, once her maternal instinct had worked its way up through her vanities and self-interests and appeared in her consciousness. The seed of it must have been planted deep, for it took a period of years to appear. In vain Stephen had looked for it when Laurel was a baby; and later when she was in the helpless, toddling stage.

For the first half-dozen years of Laurel’s life, Stella took her lightly. Not that she neglected her in any obvious way. She couldn’t. There were certain manners and forms in the modern bringing-up of a child that had to be observed. She had an excellent nurse-girl for Lollie; she spent hours in the selection of Lollie’s clothes; she had a Mother-Goose cretonne at Lollie’s windows; a Noah’s-Ark paper on Lollie’s walls. There were low chairs, and low shelves. Stella loved to show Laurel’s room to guests, when occasion arose. Laurel benefited by many an attention from Stella in those days that did not spring from the maternal instinct. However, the maternal instinct must have been growing underneath the surface, and growing according to Nature’s own methods—sending down tough wiry roots in the dark, all the while it was sending up its tender arrow-pointed shaft of life, for when it did shoot through into light, the plant was strong and vigorous.

Perhaps the first time that Stella was aware of the new insistent force within her was the day Laurel came home from school with the news about the party.