No one quite knew when or how Jeannette had become indispensable to the
Payson household; but she had. Most of all had she become indispensable
to Mrs. Carrie Payson. Between the two there existed a lion-and-mouse
friendship. Jeannette's ebullient spirits had not undergone years of
quenching from the acid stream of Mrs. Payson's criticism. Jeannette's
perceptions and valuations were the straightforward simple peasant
sort, unhampered by fine distinctions or involved reasoning. To her
Mrs. Carrie Payson was not a domineering and rather terrible person
whose word was law and whose will was adamant, but a fretful, funny,
and rather bossy old woman who generally was wrong. Jeannette was
immensely fond of her and did not take her seriously for a moment.
About the house Jeannette was as handy as a man. And this was a manless
household. She could conquer a stubborn window-shade; adjust a loose
castor in one of the bulky old chairs or bedsteads; drive a nail; put
up a shelf; set a mouse-trap.
In the very beginning she and Mrs. Payson had come to grips. Mrs.
Payson's usual attitude of fault-finding and intolerance had brought
about the situation. Jeannette had rebelled at once.
"I guess I'll have to leave to-day," she had said. "I'm going back to
the factory."
"Why?"
"I can't have nobody giving me board and room for nothing. I always
paid for what I got." She began to pack her scant belongings in the
little room on the third floor next to Hulda's. A council was summoned.
It was agreed that Jeannette should help with the household tasks;
assist Hulda with the dishes; flip-flop the mattresses; clean the
silver, perhaps. This silver-cleaning was one of Mrs. Payson's fixed
ideas. It popped into her mind whenever she saw Hulda momentarily idle.
Hulda did endless yards of coarse and hideous tatting and crocheting
intended ultimately for guimpes, edgings, bands and borders on
nightgowns, corset covers, and pillow slips. Pressed, she admitted an
Oscar in the offing. She had mounds of stout underwear, crochet-edged,
in her queer old-world trunk. When, in a leisure hour, she sat in her
room or in the orderly kitchen she was always busy with a gray and
grimy ball of this handiwork. Mrs. Payson would slam in and out of the
kitchen. "There she sits, doing nothing. Crocheting!"
"But mother," Lottie would say, "her work's all done. The kitchen's
like a pin. She cleaned the whole front of the house to-day. It isn't
time to start dinner."
"Let her clean the silver, then."
Jeannette ate her meals with Hulda and before a week had passed she
had banished the grubby and haphazard feeding off one end of the
kitchen table. She got hold of a rickety old table in the basement,
straightened its wobbly legs, painted it white, and set it up against
the kitchen wall under the window facing the back yard. In a pantry
drawer she found a faded lunch cloth of the Japanese variety, with
bluebirds on it. This she spread for their meals. They had proper
knives, forks, and spoons. The girl was friendly, good-natured,
helpful. Hulda could not resent her--even welcomed her companionship
in that rather grim household. Hulda showed Jeannette her dream-book
without which no Swedish houseworker can exist; told her her dreams
in detail. "It vos like I vos walking and yet I didn't come nowheres.
It seems like I vos in Chicago and same time it vos old country where
I ban come from and all the flowers vos blooming in fields and all of
sudden a old man comes walking and I look and it vos----" etc., ad lib.
Jeannette's business college hours were from nine to four. She went
downtown in one of Charley's straight smart tailor suits, revamped,
and a sailor with an upturned brim that gave her face a piquant look.
She did not seem to care much for what she called "the fellas." Perhaps
her searing experience of the automobile ride had scarred that side of
her. Lottie encouraged her to bring her "boy friends" to the house, but
Jeannette had not yet taken advantage of the offer. One day, soon after
her induction into the Prairie Avenue household, she had turned her
attention to the electric. Lottie had just come in from an errand with
Mrs. Payson. Jeannette waylaid her.
"Listen. If you would learn me to--huh? oh--teach me to run that thing
you ride around in, I bet I could catch on quick--quickly. Then I could
take your ma around Saturday mornings when I ain't at school; and
evenings, and you wouldn't have to, see? Will you?"
With the magic adaptability of youth she learned to drive with
incredible ease. She had no nerves; a sense of the road; an eye for
distances. After she had mastered the old car's idiosyncrasies she
became adept at it. She had a natural mechanical sense, and after
one or two encounters with the young man from the Élite Garage the
electric's motive powers were noticeably improved. Often, now, it was
Jeannette who drove Mrs. Payson to her buildings on the West Side, or
to her appointments with contractors, plumbers, carpenters, and the
like. Heretofore, on such errands, Mrs. Payson had always insisted that
Lottie wait in the electric at the curb. Seated thus, Lottie would
watch her mother with worried anxious eyes as she whisked in and out of
store doors, alleys, and basements followed by a heavy-footed workman
or contractor whose face grew more sullen and resentful each time it
appeared around a corner. Mrs. Payson's voice came floating back to
Lottie. "Now what's the best you'll do on that job. Remember, I'll have
a good deal of work later in the year if you'll do this reasonably."
Now Jeannette calmly followed Mrs. Payson in her tour of inspection.
Once or twice Mrs. Payson actually consulted her about this fence or
that floor or partition. The girl was good at figures, too; a natural
aptitude for mathematics.
Lottie found herself possessed of occasional leisure. She could spend
a half-day in the country. She could lunch in the park and stroll over
to the Wooded Island to watch and wonder at the budding marvel of trees
and shrubs and bushes. She even thought, boldly, of getting a Saturday
job of some sort--perhaps in connection with Judge Barton's court,
but hesitated to appropriate Jeannette's time permanently thus. The
atmosphere of the old Prairie Avenue home was less turbid, somehow.
Jeannette was a dash of clear cold water in the muddy sediment of their
existence. Sometimes the thought came to Lottie that she hadn't been
needed in the household after all. That is, she--Lottie Payson--to the
exclusion of anyone else. Anyone else would have done as well. She had
merely been the person at hand. Looking back on the past ten years
she hated to believe this. If she had merely been made use of thus,
then those ten years had been wasted, thrown away, useless--she put
the thought out of her mind as morbid. Sometimes, too, of late, Lottie
took a hasty fearful glance into the future and there saw herself a
septuagenarian like Aunt Charlotte; living out her life with Belle.
"No! No! No!" protested a voice within her rising to a silent shriek.
"No!"
Lottie was thirty-three the last week in April. "Now Lottie!" her
mother's friends said to her, wagging a chiding forefinger, "you're not
going to let your little niece get ahead of you, are you!"
She rarely saw the Girls now. She heard that Beck Schaefer had taken
to afternoon tea dancing. She was seen daily at hotel tea rooms in
company with pallid and incredibly slim youths of the lizard type,
their hair as glittering as their boots; lynx-eyed; exhaling a last
hasty puff of cigarette smoke as they rose from the table for the next
dance; inhaling a grateful lungful before they so much as sat down
again after that dance was finished. They wore very tight pants and
slim-waisted coats, and their hats came down over their ears as if they
were too big for their heads. Beck, smelling expensively of L'Origan
and wearing very palpable slippers and stockings was said to pay the
checks proffered by the waiter at the close of these afternoons.
Lottie's informant further confided to her that Beck was known in
tea-dance circles as The Youth's Companion.
The last week in April Mrs. Carrie Payson went to French Lick Springs
with Belle--Mrs. Payson for her rheumatism, Belle for her digestive
trouble. Henry, looking more worried and distrait than ever, was to
follow them at the end of the week. You rarely heard his big booming
laugh now. Mrs. Payson and her daughter Belle had never before gone
away together. Always it had been Lottie who had accompanied her
mother. Lottie was rather apprehensive about the outcome of the
proximity of the two. Belle did not appear to relish the prospect
particularly; but she said she needed the cure, and Henry had finally
convinced her of the utter impossibility of his going. He was rather
alarmingly frank about it. "Can't afford it, Belle," he said, "and
that's the God's truth. Business is--well, there isn't any, that's all.
You need the rest and all and I want you to go. I'll try to come down
for Saturday and Sunday but don't count on me. I may have to go to New
York any day now."
He did leave for New York that week, before the French Lick trip.
Lottie and Charley took them down to the station in the Kemps' big car
with the expert Charley at the wheel. Mrs. Payson kept up a steady
stream of admonition, reminder, direction, caution, advice. The house
was to undergo the April semiannual cleaning during her absence.
"Call up Amos again about the rugs and mattresses ... in the yard,
remember; and you've got to watch him every minute ... every inch
of the woodwork with warm water--not hot! ... a little ammonia ...
the backs of the pictures ... a pot-roast and cut it up cold for the
cleaning woman's lunch and give her plenty of potatoes ... the parlour
curtains...."
The train was gone. Lottie and Charley stood looking at each other
for a moment, wordlessly. They burst into rather wild laughter. Then
they embraced. People in the station must have thought one of them a
traveller just returned from afar. They clasped hands and raced for the
car.
"Let's go for a drive," said Charley. It was ten-thirty at night.
"All right," agreed Lottie. Charley swung the car back into Michigan,
then up Michigan headed north. The air was deliciously soft and
balmy for April in Chicago. They whisked up Lake Shore Drive and into
Lincoln Park. Lottie was almost ashamed of the feeling of freedom, of
relaxation, of exaltation that flooded her whole being. She felt alive,
and tingling and light. She was smiling unconsciously. On the way back
Charley drew up at the curb along the outside drive at the edge of
Lincoln Park, facing the lake. They sat wordlessly for a brief space in
the healing quiet and peace and darkness, with the waves lipping the
stones at their feet.
"Nice," from Charley.
"Mm."
Silence again. An occasional motor sped past them in the darkness.
To the south the great pier, like a monster sea-serpent, stretched
its mile-length into the lake. A freighter, ore-laden, plying its
course between some northern Michigan mine and an Indiana steel
mill was transformed by the darkness and distance into a barge of
beauty--mystic, silent, glittering.
"What are you going to do with your week, Lotta?"
"H'm? Oh! Well, there's the housecleaning----"
"Oh!" Charley slammed her fist down on the motor horn. It squawked in
chorus with her protest. "If what the Bible promises is true then
you're the heiress of the ages, you are."
"Heiress?"
"'The meek shall inherit the earth.'"
"I'm not meek. I'm just the kind of person that things don't happen to."
"You don't let them happen. When everything has gone wrong, and you're
feeling stifled and choked, and you've just been forbidden, as if
you were a half-wit of sixteen, to do something that you've every
right to do, what's your method! Instead of blowing up with a loud
report--instead of asserting yourself like a free-born white woman--you
put on your hat and take a long walk and work it off that way. Then
you come home with that high spiritual look on your face that makes me
want to scream and slap you. You're exactly like Aunt Charlotte. When
she and Grandma have had a tiff she sails upstairs and starts to clean
out her bureau drawers and wind old ribbons, and fold things. Well,
some day in a crisis she'll find that her bureau drawers have all been
tidied the day before. _Then_ what'll she do!"
"Muss 'em up."
"So will you--muss things up. You mark the words of a gal that's been
around."
"You kids to-day are so sure of yourselves. I wonder if your method is
going to work out any better than ours. You haven't proved it yet. You
know, always, exactly what you want to do and then you go ahead and do
it. It's so simple that there must be a catch in it somewhere."
"It's full of catches. That's what makes it so fascinating. All these
centuries we've been told to profit by the advice of our elders. What's
living for if not to experience? How can anyone know whether you're
right or wrong? Oh, I don't mean about small things. Any stranger can
decide for you that blue is more becoming than black. But the big
things--those things I want to decide for myself. I'm entitled to my
own mistakes. I've the right to be wrong. How many middle-aged people
do you know whose lives aren't a mess this minute! The thing is to be
able to say, 'I planned this myself and my plans didn't work. Now I'll
take my medicine.' You can't live somebody else's life without your
own getting all distorted in the effort. Now I'll probably marry Jesse
Dick----"
"Charley Kemp! You don't know what you're saying. You're a
nineteen-year-old infant."
"I'm a lot older than you. Of course he hasn't asked me. I don't
suppose he ever will. I mean they don't put a hand on the heart and say
will-you-be-mine. But he hadn't kissed me twice before I knew."
A faint, "Charley!"
"And he's the only man I've ever met that I can fancy still caring for
when he's forty-three and I'm forty. He'll never be snuffy and settled
and taken-for-granted. He talks to children as if they were human
beings and not nuisances or idiots. I've heard him. He's darling with
them. Sort of solemn and answers their questions intelligently. I know
that when I'm forty he'll still be able to make me laugh by calling me
'Mrs. Dick, ma'am.' We'll probably disagree, as we do now, about the
big empty things like war and politics. But we're in perfect accord
about the small things that make up everyday life. And they're the
things that count, in marriage."
"But Charley, child, does your mother know all this?"
"Oh, no. Mother thinks she's the modern woman and that she makes
up the younger generation. She doesn't realize that I'm the
younger generation. She's really as old-fashioned as any of them.
She is superior in a lot of ways, mother is. But she's like all
the rest in most. She's been so used all these years to having
people exclaim with surprise when she said she had a daughter of
sixteen--seventeen--eighteen--that now, when I'm nineteen she still
expects people to exclaim over her having a big girl. I'm not a big
girl. I'm not even what the cheap novels used to call a 'child-woman.'
Mother'll have to wake up to that."
Lottie laughed a little at a sudden recollection. "When I got this hat
last week mother went with me."
"She would," sotto voce, from Charley.
"The saleswoman brought a little pile of them--four or five--and I
tried them on; but they weren't the thing, quite. And then mother, who
was sitting there, watching me, said to the girl: 'Oh, no, those won't
do. Show us something more girlish.'"
"There!"
"Yes, but wasn't it kind of sweet? The clerk stared, of course. I heard
her giggling about it afterward to one of the other saleswomen. You
see, mother thinks I'm still a girl. When I leave the house she often
asks me if I have a clean handkerchief."
"Yes, go on, be sentimental about it. That'll help. You've let Grandma
dominate your life. That's all right--her wanting to, I mean. That's
human nature. The older generation trying to curb the younger. But your
letting her do it--that's another thing. That's a crime against your
own generation and indicates a weakness in you, not in her. The younger
generation has got to rule. Those of us who recognize that and act on
it, win. Those who don't go under."
"You're a dreadful child!" exclaimed Lottie. She more than half meant
it. "It's horrible to hear you. Where did you learn all this--this
ruthlessness?"
"I learned it at school--and out of school. Those are the things we
talk about. What did you suppose boys and girls talk about these days!"
"I don't know," Lottie replied, weakly. She thought of the girl of
the old Armour Institute days--the girl who used to go bicycling
on Saturdays with the boy in the jersey sweater. They had talked
about school, and books, and games, and dreams, and even hopes--very
diffidently and shyly--but never once about reality or life. If they
had perhaps things would have been different for Lottie Payson, she
thought now. "Let's go home, Chas."
On the drive home Charley talked of her new work. She was full of
shop stories. Nightly she brought home some fresh account of the
happenings in her department; a tale of a buyer, or customer, or clerk,
or department head. Henry Kemp called these her stock of stock-girl
stories. Following her first week at Shield's she had said grimly:
"Remember that girl O. Henry used to write about, the one who kept
thinking about her feet all the time? That's me. I'm that little
shop-girl, I am."
Her father encouraged her dinner-table conversation and roared at her
rather caustic comment:
"Our buyer came back from New York to-day. Her name's Healy. She has
her hair marcelled regularly and wears the loveliest black crêpe de
chine frocks with collars and cuffs that are simply priceless, and I
wish you could hear her pronounce 'voile.' Like this--'vwawl.' It isn't
a mouthful; it's a meal. Don't glare, mother. I know I'm vulgar. When
a North Shore customer comes in you say, 'Do let me show you a little
import that came in yesterday. It's too sweet.' All high-priced blouses
are 'little imports.' They're as precious as jewels since the war, of
course. Healy used to be a stock-girl. They say her hair is gray but
she dyes it the most fetching raspberry shade. Her salary is twelve
thousand a year and she could get eighteen at any one of the other big
stores. She stays at Shield's because she thinks it has distinction.
'Class,' she calls it, unless she's talking to a customer or someone
else she's trying to impress. Then she says 'atmosphere.' She supports
her mother and a good for-nothing brother. I like her. Her nails
glitter something grand. She calls me girlie. I wonder if her pearls
are real."
Lottie listened now, fascinated, amused, and yet wondering, as Charley
gave an account of the meeting of the Ever Upward Club. Charley was
driving with one hand on the steering wheel. She was slumped low down
on her spine. Lottie thought how relaxed she looked and almost babyish,
and yet how vital and how knowing. The Ever Upward Club, she explained,
was made up of the women workers in Shield's. There had been a meeting
of the club this morning, before the store opened at nine. It was the
club's twenty-fifth anniversary. Charley, on the subject, was vitriol.
"There they sat, in their black dresses and white collars. Some of the
collars weren't so white. I suppose, after a few years, washing out
white collars at night when you get home from work loses its appeal.
First Kiesing made a speech about the meaning of Shield's, and the
loftiness of its aim. I don't know where he got his information but I
gathered that to have the privilege of clerking there makes you one
of the anointed. Kiesing's general manager, you know. Then he brought
forward Mrs. Hough. She's pretty old and her teeth sort of stick out
and her voice is high and what they call querulous, I suppose. Anyway
it never drops at the end of a sentence. She told how she had started
the Ever Upward Club with a membership of only fifteen, and now look
at it. Considering that you have to belong to it, and pay your dues
automatically when you enter the store, I don't see why she feels so
set up about it. But anyway, she does. You'd think she had gone around
converting the heathen to Christianity. She told us in that nasal
rasping voice that it was the spirit of cheer and good-will that made
tasks light. Yes, indeed. And when we got home at night we were to help
our mothers with the dishes in a spirit of cheer and with a right good
will. Then she read one of those terrible vim-and-vigour poems. You
know. Something like this:
If you think you are beaten, you are.
If you think you dare not, you don't.
If you like to win and don't think you can
It's almost a cinch you won't.
There was a lot more to it, about Life's battles and the man who wins.
Most of the girls looked half-dead in their chairs. They had been
working over-time for the spring opening. Then a girl sprang to the
platform--she's the club athletic director, a college girl, big, husky,
good-looking brute, too. 'Three rousing cheers for Mrs. Hough! Hip
hip--' We all piped up. And I couldn't think of anything but Oliver
Twist and the beadle--what was his name?--Bumble. Then this girl told
us about the value of games and the Spirit of Play, and how we should
leap and run about--after you've done the dinner dishes with a right
good will, I suppose, having previously walked eleven thousand miles
in your department showing little imports and trying to convince a
woman with a forty-two bust that a thirty-eight blouse is a little
snug.... 'The romance of business.' Ha!"
"But you like it, don't you Charley?"
"Yes. Goodness knows why. Certainly I don't want to turn out a Healy,
or a Hough--or even a female Kiesing. Jesse did a poem about it all."
"A good one?"
"Good--yes. And terrible. One of his sledge-hammer things. He calls it
'Merchandise.' The girls, of course."
They stopped at a corner drug store and had ice cream sodas. Charley
was to spend the night at the Prairie Avenue house. She had a brilliant
thought. "Let's bring a chocolate soda home to Aunt Charlotte." They
ordered two in pressed paper cartons and presented them at midnight to
Aunt Charlotte and Jeannette. Jeannette, looking like a rose baby, ate
hers in a semi-trance, her lids weighted with sleep. But great-aunt
Charlotte was wide-awake immediately, as though a midnight chocolate
ice cream soda were her prescribed night-cap. She sipped and blinked
and scraped the bottom of the container with her spoon. Then, with an
appreciative sigh, she lay back on her pillow.
"What time is it, Lottie?"
"After midnight. Twelve-twenty."
"That's nice," said Aunt Charlotte. "Let's have waffles for breakfast."
The mice were playing.
It was Lottie's idea that they accomplish the spring house cleaning in
three volcanic days instead of devoting a week or more to it, as was
Mrs. Payson's habit. "Let's all pitch in," she said, "and get it over
with. Then we'll have a week to play in." Mrs. Payson was to remain ten
days at French Lick.
There followed such an orgy of beating, pounding, flapping, brushing,
swashing, and scrubbing as no corps of able-bodied men could have
survived. The women emerged from it with shrivelled fingers, broken
nails, and aching spines, but the Prairie Avenue house was clean,
even to the backs of the pictures. After it was over Lottie had a
Turkish bath, a manicure, and a shampoo and proclaimed herself socially
accessible.
Hulda drank coffee happily, all day. Great-aunt Charlotte announced
that she thought she'd have some of the girls in for the afternoon. She
invited a group of ancients whose names sounded like the topmost row
of Chicago's social register. Their sons or grandsons were world-powers
in banking, packing, grain-distribution. Some of them Aunt Charlotte
had not seen in years. They rolled up in great fat black limousines
and rustled in black silks as modish as Aunt Charlotte's own.
Lottie saw to the tea and left them absolutely alone. She heard them
snickering and gossiping in their high plangent voices. They bragged
in a well-bred way about their sons or grandsons or sons-in-law. They
gossiped. They reminisced.
"And do you remember when the Palmer House barber shop floor was paved
at intervals with silver dollars and the farmers used to come from
miles around to see it?"
"There hasn't been a real social leader in Chicago since Mrs. Potter
Palmer died."
"Yes, I know. She's tried. But charm--that's the thing she hasn't got.
No. She thinks her money will do it. Never."
"Well, it seems----"
What a good time they were having, Lottie thought. She had set the
table in the dining room. There were spring flowers and candles. She
saw that they were properly served, but effaced herself. She sensed
that her presence would, somehow, mar Aunt Charlotte's complete sense
of freedom, of hospitality, of hostesship.
They did not leave until six. After they were gone Aunt Charlotte
stepped about the sitting room putting the furniture to rights. She was
tired, but too stimulated to rest. Her cheeks were flushed.
"Minnie Parnell is beginning to show her age, don't you think? Did you
see the hat Henrietta Grismore wore? Well, I should think, with all her
money! But then, she always was a funny girl. No style."
When, two days later, Lottie had Emma Barton and Winnie Steppler
to dinner Aunt Charlotte kept her room. She said she felt a little
tired--the spring weather perhaps. She'd have just a bite on a tray if
Jeannette would bring it up to her; and then she'd go to bed. Do her
good. Lottie, understanding, kissed her.
Lottie and her two friends had one of those long animated talks. Lottie
had lighted a fire in the sitting room fireplace. There were flowers in
the room--jonquils, tulips. The old house was quiet, peaceful. Lottie
made a charming hostess. They laughed a good deal from the very start
when Winnie Steppler had come up the stairs panting apologies for her
new head-gear.
"Don't say it's too youthful. I know it. I bought it on that fine day
last week--the kind of spring day that makes you go into a shop and buy
a hat that's too young for you." Her cheeks were rosy. When she laughed
she opened her mouth wide and stuck her tongue out so that she reminded
you of the talcum baby picture so familiar to everyone. A woman of
tremendous energy--magnetic, witty, zestful.
"Fifty's the age!" she announced with gusto, as dinner progressed. "At
fifty you haven't a figger any more than you have legs--except, of
course, for purposes of locomotion. At fifty you can eat and drink what
you like. Chocolate with whipped-cream at four in the afternoon. Who
cares! A second helping of dessert. It's a grand time of life. At fifty
you don't wait for the telephone to ring. Will he call me! Won't he
call me! A telephone's just a telephone at fifty--a convenience without
a thrill to it. Many's the time that bell has stabbed me. But not now.
Nothing more can happen to you at fifty--if you've lived your life as
you should. Here I sit, stays loosened, savouring life. I wouldn't
change places with any young sprat I know."
Emma Barton smiled, calm-eyed. Winnie Steppler had been twice married,
once widowed, once divorced. Emma Barton had never married. Yet both
knew peace at fifty.
"Well," said Lottie, as they rose from the table, "perhaps, by the
time I'm fifty--but just now I've such a frightened feeling as though
everything were passing me by; all the things that matter. I want to
grab at life and say, 'Heh, wait a minute! Aren't you forgetting me?'"
Winnie Steppler glanced at her sharply. "Look out, my girl, that it
doesn't rush back at your call and drop the wrong trick into your lap."
A little flash of defiance came into Lottie's eyes. "The wrong trick's
better than no trick at all."
Emma Barton looked at Lottie curiously, with much the same glance that
she bestowed upon the girls who came before her each morning. "What do
you need to keep you happy, Lottie?"
Lottie did not hesitate a moment. "Work that's congenial; books; music
occasionally; a picnic in the woods; a five-mile hike, a well-fitting
suit, a thirteen-dollar corset, Charley--I didn't mean to place her
last. She should be up at the beginning somewhere."
"How about this superstition they call love?" inquired Winnie Steppler.
Lottie shrugged her shoulders. Winnie persisted. "There must have been
somebody, some time."
"Well, when I was seventeen or eighteen--but there never was anything
serious about it, really. Since then--you wouldn't believe how
rarely women of my type meet men--interesting men. You have to make
a point of meeting them, I suppose. And I've been here at home. I'm
thirty-three. Not bad looking. I've kept my figure, and hair, and
skin. Walking, I suppose. The men I know are snuffy bachelors nearing
fifty, or widowers with three children. They'd rather go to a musical
show than a symphony concert; they'll tell you they do enough walking
in their business. I don't mind their being bald--though why should
they be?--but I do mind their being snuffy. I suppose there are men of
about my own age who like the things I like; whose viewpoint is mine.
But attractive men of thirty-five marry girls of twenty. I don't want
to marry a boy of twenty; but neither can I work up any enthusiasm
for a man of fifty who tells me that what he wants is a home, and who
would no more take a tramp in the country for enjoyment than he would
contemplate a trip to Mars."
Emma Barton interposed. "What were you doing at twenty-five?"
Lottie glanced around the room. Her hand came out in a little gesture
that included the house and its occupants. "Just what I'm doing now.
But not even thinking about it--as I do now! I think I had an idea I
was important. Now that I look back on it, it seems to me I've just
been running errands for the last ten years or more. Running errands up
and down, while the world has gone by."
Two days before her mother's return Lottie prevailed upon Jeannette
to invite a half dozen or more of her business college acquaintances
to spend the evening at the house. Jeannette demurred at first, but
it was plain the idea fascinated her. Seven of them arrived at the
time appointed. Their ages ranged between seventeen and twenty-two.
The girls were amazingly well dressed in georgettes and taffetas and
smart slippers and silk stockings. The boys were, for the most part,
of the shipping-clerk type. They were all palpably impressed with the
big old house on Prairie, its massive furniture and pictures, its
occupants. Lottie met them all, as did Aunt Charlotte who had donned
her second-best black silk and her jewelry and had crimped her hair for
the occasion. She sensed that what Jeannette needed was background.
Aunt Charlotte vanished before nine and Lottie did likewise, to appear
again only for the serving of the ice cream and cake. They danced,
sang, seemed really to enjoy the evening. After they had gone Jeannette
turned to Lottie and catching up one of her hands pressed it against
her own glowing cheek. Her eyes were very bright. They--and the
gesture--supplied the meaning that her inarticulate speech lacked. "It
was grand!"
It was typical of Charley and indicative of the freedom with which she
lived, that her existence during the ten days of her mother's absence
did not vary at all from the usual. She would have been torn between
laughter and fury could she have realised the sense of boldness and
freedom with which Lottie, her aunt, and Charlotte, her great-aunt,
set about planning their innocent maidenly revels.
Mrs. Payson and Belle returned from French Lick the first week in
May. Mrs. Payson, divesting herself of her wraps, ran a quick and
comprehensive eye over the room, over Lottie, over Aunt Charlotte,
Jeannette, Hulda. It was as though she read Coffee! Tea Party! Dinner!
Dance! in their faces. Her first question seemed to carry with it a
hidden meaning. "Well, what have you been doing while I've been gone?
Did Brosch call up about the plastering? Did you have Henry and Charley
to dinner? Any letters? How many days did you have Mrs. Schlagel for
the cleaning? Lottie, get me a cup of tea. I feel kind of faint--not
hungry, but a faint feeling. Oh--Ben Gartz was in French Lick. Did I
write you? He was very attentive. Very. Every inch the gentleman. I
don't know what Belle and I would have done without him."