“Gosh, Effie,” she had said afterward, “I don’t care what people do to me, but to stick hatpins into Lollie—into my baby! Say, that’s more than I can stand. I’m ready to use my claws on anybody who hurts Lollie.”

3

DURING THE YEARS between Laurel’s sixth birthday and her thirteenth there were many times for Stella to use her claws. There were many times that Laurel was hurt and Stella knew it. Though the funny little kid doesn’t think I do. She never lets on to me. I just have to guess at it from the way she acts.

If she came home from school especially quiet and uncommunicative, and was not very hungry at dinner, Stella would begin to be suspicious.

“What’s the matter?” she would demand with a piercing look.

“Nothing,” Laurel would reply, feigned surprise and wonder in her voice.

“Has anything happened at school?”

“No.”

“Who’d you play with at recess?”

“Nobody special.”

“Did you play all alone?”

“No.”

“Look here, Lollie. Answer me. Has somebody been horrid to you? Has somebody hurt your feelings?”

“No.”

If Stella stared at her hard enough, probed long enough, Laurel might reply, “My stomach aches a little bit,” and pay the price of two shredded wheat biscuits and no dessert for dinner.

It would never be from Laurel that Stella would get the first wind of a party in prospect from which Laurel was omitted. Laurel would never tell her that the girls in her class were meeting every few days at each other’s houses to work for a fair, or to rehearse a play or fête in which she had no part. When information of an event of this sort did reach Stella, she knew then what had been the cause of Laurel’s quiet, brown-study day a week ago. And yet she couldn’t use her claws after all. It would be the worst policy in the world. For the sake of Lollie’s future, for that dim, far-away, full-of-promise time when Lollie would “come out” (girls “came out,” now, in Milhampton), she must be as nice and purry as she knew how to the women she knew who could help her daughter.

Laurel could see through her mother’s little shams and deceits, devised to spare her pain, much quicker than Stella could see through Laurel’s. At thirteen Laurel was an odd mixture of artificiality and truthfulness, of craft and naïveté, of grown-up woman and little girl. She could deceive her mother without flickering an eyelash, and could repeat to strangers the little white lies Stella taught her, with the finesse of a woman of the world, but at school in her work and play, she was never anything but strictly honest.