She had not referred to Mrs. Morrison in her letters to her mother. That was not strange. Laurel was not fluent with her pen. Her letters were labored little notes, usually, that mirrored her personality imperfectly. Laurel’s father used to say he could scarcely catch a glimpse of Laurel in the stilted notes she wrote to him. Once Laurel had tried to write to her mother about Mrs. Morrison, but Mrs. Morrison was like the Maine woods. There was so much to say that you just didn’t know what one or two things to choose to cramp into half a dozen proper little sentences that must begin with a capital, contain a subject and a predicate, and end with a period.

“You’d love her clothes, Mother,” Laurel now went on. “She’s got the loveliest negligée, she’s got two or three lovely negligées, but I think my favorite was a yellowish one, made of a most beautiful crêpy stuff, with not a speck of trimming on it anywhere.”

“Negligée!” exclaimed Stella. “Did she spend the night with you?”

“Oh, no, I spent the night with her. I spent almost a whole week of nights with her, while father was in Chicago.”

“Oh, you did, did you?” said Stella, speaking thickly through an orange-stick which she held between her teeth. Stella often used her mouth to hold small tools, when she sewed or manicured. Lucky for her now! A sudden suspicion had shot up and gripped her in the throat. The orange-stick helped to disguise the tenseness in her voice. “That was a funny arrangement, I should think.”

“I didn’t want to go a bit, at first,” said Laurel. “I was frightened at the thought of visiting a stranger. But I needn’t have been. Mrs. Morrison was perfectly lovely to me!”

“Oh, she was, was she? How?”

“Just every way there is to be lovely. For one thing—she thought I had lovely clothes, and that you had awfully good taste. She said so. She talked about you, Mother. She thought you must be simply beautiful when I told her what you looked like.”

“What does she look like?”

“A little like an Indian Pipe,” said Laurel reflectively. “That’s a sort of flower that grows in dark places up in the Maine woods. It hasn’t got any color at all.”

“Oh, gracious. I mean is she tall or short, dark or light, fat or thin. I don’t care what kind of a flower she looks like.”