Somehow things went wrong here. She had expected an almost sanctified atmosphere. She was accustomed to being regarded as essentially devout, but there was a sense of order in the school which she felt was mechanical, class-room work seemed to be counted as important as religious services, and her fervidly expressed religious experiences appeared to reflect chill rather than the accustomed warmth of the home prayer-meetings. Moreover, real lessons were assigned which no amount of religious feeling or no intensity of personal praying made easy. She hadn't studied for years; in fact, she had never learned to do intellectual work studiously. And even these good religious teachers did not hesitate to demand accurate recitations. She had been accustomed for years to have preference shown, and here she was treated only as one of many, and, humiliatingly, as one who was failing to maintain the standards of the many. She fell behind in the two most important studies, nor was her classwork in general good. Whether she would have later proven capable of getting down to rock bottom and meeting the demands of reason on a rational basis, we cannot say, for the family hobby abruptly terminated her missionary career. "Mother dangerously sick with inflammatory rheumatism. Come at once," the telegram said--and she hastily returned home to be met with, what her history records as, "my second shock." Her mother WAS sick, and truly and genuinely suffering. The house was in disorder. Weeks followed in which Stella's best strength was needed. Her mother slowly mended, but never regained her old activity. The doctor said a heart-valve was damaged, and the family thereafter were never quite certain when the sudden end would come--an uncertainty which was proven legitimate ten years later, when she died, almost suddenly. Stella had met shock number two very well. The home-love and welcome and the warmth of feeling she experienced in the home-church were a never-admitted relief from the rigid exactions of the training- school life, and did much to neutralize, for the time, her anxiety about her mother and the "strain of her care." It was a family which ever advertised home-devotion, and so this call of home illness completely obscured all other plans for three years. But home responsibilities quite wrecked her church-going record. In fact, it was unkindly whispered that Stella was "backsliding." And these same whispers found audible expression the summer she was twenty-two, when attractive Lee Burnham, the judge's son, spent his summer vacation at home, and "took her buggy-riding every Sunday evening for over two months."