"Certainly," she assured him lightly. "Of course it will tie me down, terribly, for a while, but Myrtle says" (she was constantly quoting Myrtle to Stephen), "Myrtle says I'd be awfully out of things in the long run, if I didn't ever have a child. All the young married set talk babies—at least the women; and, after all, it is sort of fun to dress the cunning little things up, and send them out rolling, with a nurse-girl. Myrtle has got a baby. She dresses her in darling things, and Phyllis" (Phyllis was often quoted to Stephen, too) "told me something is going to happen to her next summer. I'm really quite in the swim."
Stephen turned away, no longer dismayed. Only a little more disillusioned.
2
Laurel was born in June. Stephen named her Laurel—at least it was the name he applied to her the first time he saw her. He had come across some clumps of mountain-laurel in bud a day or two before, when out on one of his long tramps. The buds were clusters of sticky little spurs of deep pink and red. The first morning the trained nurse brought Laurel to Stephen for inspection, the baby was wrapped up in layers upon layers of flannel. Only the tip of her little pink head was showing.
"Hello, you little mountain-laurel bud," Stephen had said to her, at a loss to know what to say.
He never would have called her a laurel-bud again. It was the nurse who insisted upon the term. Every morning when she took the baby to Stephen for inspection (a ceremony she never failed to per-
