CHAPTER VI
Lottie Payson was striding home through the early evening mist, the zany March wind buffeting her skirts—no: skirt; it is 1916 and women are knicker-bockered underneath instead of petticoated. She had come from what is known on the South Side as "spending the afternoon."
Of late years Lottie had given up this spending of afternoons. Choice and circumstances had combined to bring this about. Her interests had grown away from these women who had been her school-girl friends. The two women with whom she lived made her the staff on which they leaned more and more heavily. Lottie Payson was head of the household in everything but authority. Mrs. Carrie Payson still held the reins.
The afternoons had started as a Reading Club when Lottie was about twenty-five and the others a year or two older or younger. Serious reading. Yes, indeed. Effie Case had said, "We ought to improve our minds; not just read anything. I think it would be fine to start with the German poets; Gerty and those."
So they had started with Goethe and those but found the going rather rough. This guttural year had been followed by one of French conversation led by a catarrhal person who turned out to be Vermontese instead of Parisian, which accounted for their having learned to pronounceleas "ler." After this they had turned to Modern American Literature; thence, by a process of degeneration, to Current Topics. They had a leader for the Current Topics Class, a retired Madam Chairman. She grafted the front-page headlines onto theLiterary Digestand produced a brackish fruit tasting slightly of politics, invention, scandal, dress, labor, society, disease, crime, and royalty. One day, at the last minute, when she had failed to appear for the regular meeting—grip, or a heavy cold—someone suggested, "How about two tables of bridge?" After that the Reading Class alternated between bridge and sewing. The sewing was quite individual and might range all the way from satin camisoles to huckaback towels; from bead bags to bedspreads. The talk, strangely enough, differed little from that of the personally-conducted Current Topics Class days. They all attended lectures pretty regularly; and symphony concerts and civic club meetings.
In the very beginning they had made a rule about refreshments. "No elaborate serving," they had said. "Just tea or coffee, and toast. And perhaps a strawberry jam or something like that. But that's all. Nobody does it any more." The salads, cakes, and ices of an earlier period were considered vulgar for afternoons. Besides, banting had come in, and these women were nearing thirty; some of them had passed it—an age when fat creeps slyly about the hips and arms and shoulder-blades and stubbornly remains, once ensconced. Still, this rule had slowly degenerated as had the club's original purpose. As they read less during these afternoons they ate more. Beck Schaefer discovered and served a new fruit salad with Hawaiian pineapple and marshmallows as its plot. When next they met at Effie Case's she served her salad in little vivid baskets made of oranges hollowed out, with one half of the skin cut away except for a strip across the top to form the basket's handle. After that there was no more tea and toast. After that, too, the attendance of certain members of the erstwhile Reading Club became more and more irregular and finally ceased altogether. These delinquents were the more serious-minded ones of the group. One became a settlement worker. Another went into the office of an advertising agency and gave all her time and thought to emphasising the desirability of certain breakfast foods, massage creams, chewing gum, and garters. Still another had become a successful Science Practitioner, with an office in the Lake Building and a waiting room always full of claims. As for Lottie Payson—her youth and health, her vigor and courage all went into the service of two old women. Of these the one took selfishly; the other reluctantly, protestingly. The Reading Club had long ago ceased to exist for Lottie.
In the morning she drove her mother to market in the ramshackle old electric. Mrs. Payson seldom drove it herself. The peculiar form of rheumatism from which she suffered rendered her left hand almost useless. The electric had been a fine piece of mechanism in its day but years of service had taken the spring from its joints and the life from its batteries. Those batteries now were as uncertain as a tired old heart that may stop its labored beating any moment. A balky starter and an unreliable starter, its two levers needed two strong hands with muscle-control behind them. Besides, one had to be quick. As the Paysons rumbled about in this rheumatic coach, haughty and contemptuous gas cars were always hooting impatiently behind them, nosing them perilously out of the way in the traffic's flood, their drivers frequently calling out ribald remarks about hearses.
In this vehicle drawn up at the curb outside the market Lottie would sit reading theSurvey(Judge Barton's influence there) while her mother carried on a prolonged and acrimonious transaction with Gus. Thirty-first Street, then Thirty-fifth Street, had become impossible for the family marketing. There groceries and meat markets catered frankly to the Negro trade. Prosperous enough trade it seemed, too, with the windows piled with plump broilers and juicy cuts of ham. The Payson electric waited in Forty-third Street now.
Gus's red good-natured face above the enveloping white apron became redder and less good-natured as Mrs. Payson's marketing progressed. New potatoes. A piece of rump for a pot-roast. A head of lettuce. A basket of peaches. Echoes floated out to Lottie waiting at the curb.
"Yeh, but looka here, Mis' Payson, I ain't makin' nothin' on that stuff as it is. Two three cents at the most. SayIgotta live too, you know.... Oh, you don't wantthat, Mis' Payson. Tell you the truth, they're pretty soft. Now here's a nice fresh lot come in from Michigan this morning. I picked 'em out myself down on South Water."
Mrs. Payson's decided tones: "They'll do for stewing."
"All right. 'S for you to say. You got to eat 'em, not me. On'y don't come around to-morrow tellin' me they was no good."
Her purchases piled on the leather-upholstered front seat of the electric, Mrs. Payson would be driven home, complaining acidly. This finished Gus for her. Robber! Twenty-seven cents for lamb stew!
"But mama, Belle paid thirty-two cents last week. I remember hearing her say that lamb stew was seven or eight cents two or three years ago and now it's thirty-two or thirty——"
"Oh, Belle! I'm surprised she ever has lamb stew. Always running short on her allowance with her sirloins and her mushrooms and her broilers. I ran a household for a whole month on what she uses in a week, when I was her age. I don't know how Henry stands it."
This ceremony of marketing took half the morning. It should have required little more than an hour. On arriving home Mrs. Payson usually complained of feeling faint. Her purchases piled on the kitchen table, she would go over them with Hulda, the maid-servant. "Put that lettuce in a damp cloth." The maid was doing it. "Rub a little salt and vinegar into that pot roast." The girl had intended to. "You'll have to stew those peaches." That had been apparent after the first disdainful pressing with thumb and forefinger. By this time Hulda's attitude was the bristling one natural to any human being whose intelligence has been insulted by being told to do that which she already had meant to do. Mrs. Payson, still wearing her hat (slightly askew now) would accept the crackers and cheese, or the bit of cold lamb and slice of bread, proffered by Lottie to fend off the "faintness." Often Mrs. Payson augmented this with a rather surprising draught of sherry in a tumbler, from the supply sent by her son-in-law Henry Kemp.
On fine afternoons Lottie often drove her mother and Aunt Charlotte to Jackson Park, drawing up at the curb along the lake walk. A glorious sight, that panorama. It was almost like being at sea, minus the discomfort of travel. The great blue inland ocean stretched before them, away, and away, and away until it met the sky. For the most part the three women did nothing. Mrs. Payson had always hated sewing. Great-aunt Charlotte sometimes knitted. Her eyes were not needed for that. But oftenest she sat there gazing out upon the restless expanse of Lake Michigan, her hands moving as restlessly as the shifting ageless waters. Great-aunt Charlotte's hands were seldom still. Always they moved over her lap, smoothing a bit of cloth, tracing an imaginary pattern with a wrinkled parchment forefinger; pleating a fold of her napkin when at table. Hands with brown splotches on the backs. Moving, moving, and yet curiously inactive. Sometimes Lottie read aloud, but not often. Her mother was restless at being read aloud to; besides, she liked stories with what is known as a business interest. Great-aunt Charlotte liked romance. No villain too dastardly—no heroine too lovely and misunderstood—no hero too ardent and athletic for Aunt Charlotte's taste. She swallowed them, boots, moonlight, automobiles, papers and all. "Such stuff!" Mrs. Carrie Payson would say.
The conversation of the three women sitting there in the little glass-enclosed box was desultory, unvital. They had little to say to one another. Yet each would have been surprised to learn what a reputation for liveliness and wit the other had in her own circle. Lottie was known among "the girls" to be mischievous and gay; Carrie Payson could keep a swift and keen pace in conversation with a group of business men, or after a hand at bridge with women younger than she (Mrs. Payson did not care for the company of women of her own age); Great-aunt Charlotte's sallies and observations among her septuagenarian circle often brought forth a chorus of cackling laughter. Yet now:
"Who's that coming along past the Iowa building?" (Relic of World's Fair days.)
"I can't tell from here, mama."
"Must be walking to reduce, with that figure, on a day like this. It's that Mrs. Deffler, isn't it, that lives near Belle's? No, it isn't. She's too dark. Yes it ... no...."
Lottie said aloud, "No, it isn't." And within: "If I could only jump out of this old rattle-trap and into a boat—a boat with sails all spread—and away to that place over there that's the horizon. Oh, God, how I'd ... but I suppose I'd only land at Indiana Harbor instead of at the horizon." Then aloud again, "If you and Aunt Charlotte think you'll be comfortable here for twenty minutes or so I'll just walk up as far as the pier and back."
"That's right," from Aunt Charlotte. "Do you good. What's more"—she chuckled an almost wicked chuckle—"I'd never come back, if I were you."
Mrs. Carrie Payson eyed her sister witheringly. "Don't be childish, Charlotte."
Out on the walk, her face toward the lake, her head lifted, her hands jammed into her sweater pockets, Lottie was off.
A voice was calling her.
"What?"
"Your hat! You forgot your hat!"
"I don't want it." She turned resolutely away from the maternal voice and the hat. Her mother's head was stuck out of the car door. Lottie heard, unheeding, a last faint "Sunburn!" and "Complexion." A half mile up, a half mile back. Walking gave her a sense of freedom, of exhilaration; helped her to face the rest of the day.
In the evening they often drove round to Belle's; or about the park again on warm summer nights.
But on this particular March afternoon the Reading Club once more claimed Lottie. One of the Readers had married. This was her long-planned afternoon at home for the girls. Her newly-furnished four-room apartment awaited their knowing inspection. Her wedding silver and linen shone and glittered for them. Celia Sprague was a bride at thirty-six, after a ten-years' engagement.
"Now, Lottie," she had said, over the telephone, "you've just got to come. Every one of the girls will be here. It's my first party in my new home. Oh, I notice you find time for your new highbrow friends. It won't hurt you to come slumming this once. Well, but your mother can do without you for one afternoon can't she! Good heavens, you'vesomeright to your——"
Lottie came. She came and brought her knitting as did every other member of the Reading Club. Satin camisoles, lingerie, hemstitching, and bead bags had been abandoned for hanks of wool. The Reading Club, together with the rest of North America, was swaddling all Belgium in a million pounds of gray and olive-drab sweaters, mufflers, socks, caps, mittens, helmets, stomach bands. Purl and knit, purl and knit, the Reading Club scarcely dropped a stitch as it exclaimed, and cooed andah'dandoh'dover Celia Sprague Horner's ("Oh now, that's all right! Just call me Celia Sprague. Everybody does. I can't get used to it myself, after all the years I've been—Why just last week at Shield's, when I was giving my charge, I told the clerk—") new four-room apartment on Fifty-first Street—now more elegantly known as Hyde Park Boulevard. Curiously enough Celia, who had been rather a haggard and faded fiancée of thirty-six, was now, by some magic process, a well-preserved and attractive young matron of thirty-six. A certain new assurance in her bearing; a blithe self-confidence in her conversation; a look in her eyes. The beloved woman.
"This is the bedroom. Weren't we lucky to get two windows! The sun just pours in all day—in fact, every room is sunny, even the kitchen." The Reading Club regarded the bedroom rather nervously. Celia Sprague had been one of them, so long. And now.... Two small French beds of dark mahogany, with a silken counterpane on each. "No, just you put your things right down on the beds, girls. It won't hurt the spreads a bit. Everything in this house is going to be used. That's what it's for." On the bed nearest the wall a little rosy mound of lingerie pillows, all afroth with filet, and Irish, and eyelet embroidery and cut work. Celia had spent countless Reading Club afternoons on this handiwork. The rosy mound served no more practical purpose than the velvet and embroidered slippers that used to hang on the wall in her grandmother's day. Two silver-backed military brushes on the dull mahogany chest of drawers—"chiffo-robe," Celia would tell you. The Reading Club eyed them, smiling a little. Celia opened a closet door to dilate upon its roominess. A whole battalion of carefully-hung trousers leaped out at them from the door-rack. The Reading Club actually stepped back a little, startled. "Orville's clothes take up more room than mine, I always tell him. And everything just so. I never saw such a man!" She talked as one to whom men and their ways were an old, though amusing, story. "He's the neatest thing."
Out to the living room. "Oh, Celia thisissweet! I love your desk. It's so different." The room was the conventional bridal living room; a plum-coloured velvet davenport, its back against a long, very retiring table whose silk-shaded lamp showed above the davenport's broad back like someone playing hide-and-seek behind a hedge. There were lamps, and lamps, and lamps—a forest of them. The book-shelves on either side of the gas-log grate held a rather wistful library, the wedding gift "sets" of red and gold eked out with such school-girl fillers as the Pepper Books, Hans Brinker, and Louisa Alcott.
"A woman twice a week—one day to clean and one to wash and iron. Orville wants me to have a maid but I say what for? She'd have to sleep out and you never can depend—besides, it's just play. We have dinner out two or three nights——"
They were seated now, twittering, each with her knitting. A well-dressed, alert group of women, their figures trim in careful corsets, their hair, teeth, complexions showing daily care and attention. The long slim needles—ebony, amber, white—flew and flashed in the sunlight.
"... This is my sixth sweater. I do 'em in my sleep."
"... It's the heel that's the trick. Once I've passed that——"
"... My brother says we'll never go in. We're a peace-loving nation, he says. We simply don't believe in war. Barbaric."
The handiwork of each was a complete character index. The bride was painstaking and bungling. Her knitting showed frequent bunches and lumps. Beck Schaefer's needles were swift, brilliant, and slovenly. Effie Case's sallow sensual face, her fragile waxen fingers, showed her distaste for the coarse fabric with which she was expertly occupied. Amy Stattler, the Social Service worker, knitted as though she found knitting restful. A plume of white showed startlingly in the soft black of her hair. Prim sheer white cuffs and collar finished her black gown at wrists and throat. Beck Schaefer, lolling on the other side of the room, her legs crossed to show plump gray silk calves, her feet in gray suede slippers ornamented with huge cut-steel buckles, seemed suddenly showy and even vulgar in comparison. She was, paradoxically, good-hearted and unpopular. This last because she was given to indulging in that dangerous pastime known as "being perfectly frank." Instinctively you shrank when Beck Schaefer began a sentence with, "Now, I'm going to be perfectly frank with you." She was rarely perfectly frank with the men, however. She had a way of shaking a coquettish forefinger at the more elderly of these and saying, "Will you never grow up!" People said of Beck that she lighted up well in the evening.
Lottie Payson was knitting a sleeveless, olive-drab sweater. Row after row, inch after inch, it grew and lengthened, a flawless thing. Lottie hated knitting. As she bent over the work her face wore a look for definition of which you were baffled. Not a sullen look nor brooding, but bound. That was it! Not free.
The talk at first was casual, uninteresting.
"Lot, is that the skirt to the suit Heller made you last winter?... His things are as good the second season as they are the first. Keep their shape. And he certainly does know how to get a sleeve in. His shoulder line...."
"... the minute I begin to gain I can tell by my waistbands——"
"... if you purl three knit two——"
Beck Schaefer had ceased to knit. She was looking at the intent little group. She represented a certain thwarted type of unwed woman in whom the sensual is expressed, pitifully enough, in terms of silk and lacy lingerie; in innuendo; in a hungry roving eye; in a little droop at the corners of the mouth; in an over-generous display of plump arms, or bosom, or even knees. Beck's married friends often took her with them in the evenings as a welcome third to relieve the tedium of a wedded tête-à-tête. They found a vicarious pleasure in giving Beck a good time.
Suddenly, in the midst of the brittle chatter and laughter, was thrust the steel edge of Beck Schaefer's insolent voice, high, shrill.
"Well, Cele, tell us the truth: are you happy?"
The bride, startled, dropped a stitch, looked up, looked down, flushed. "Why yes, of course, you bad thing!"
"Ye-e-es, but I mean really happy. Come on now, give us the truth. Come on. Let's all tell the truth, for once. Are you really happy, Cele?"
The others laughed a little uncomfortably. Celia's face was red. Lottie's voice, rather deeper than most women's, and with a contralto note in it., was heard through the staccato sounds.
"Well, at least, Beck, she won't have to listen to her married friends saying, 'What's the matter with the men nowadays! What do they mean by letting a wonderful girl like you stay single, h'm?'"
They laughed at that. The atmosphere cleared a little. But Beck Schaefer's eyes were narrowed. "Now I'm looking for information. We're all friends here. We're all in the same boat—all except Celia, and she's climbed out of the boat and onto a raft. I want to know if it was worth the risk of changing. Here we all are—except Celia—failures. Any unmarried woman is a self-confessed failure."
A babel of protest. "How about Jane Addams!... Queen Elizabeth.... Joan of Arc!"
"Queen Elizabeth was a hussy. Jane Addams is a saint. Joan of Arc—well——"
Lottie Payson looked up from her knitting. "Joan of Arc had the courage to live her own life, which is more than any of us have. She called it listening to the voices, but I suppose what she really wanted was to get away from home. If she had weakened and said, 'Ma, I know I oughtn't to leave you. You need me to tend the geese,' her mother might have been happier, and Joan would have lived a lot longer, but the history of France would have been different."
Beck Schaefer frankly cast aside her knitting, hugged one knee with her jewel-decked hands, and waited for the laughter to subside. "You're all afraid of the truth—that'sthe truth. I'm willing to come through——"
"Goodness, Beck, where do you pick up that low talk!"
"I'm willing to come through if the rest of you are. We're all such a lot of liars. We all know Cele there had to wait ten years for her Orville because he had to support two selfish sisters and an invalid mother; and even after the mother died the two cats wouldn't go to live in two rooms as they should have, so that Celia and Orville could afford to be happy together. No! They wanted all the comforts he'd given them for years and so Celia——"
"Beck Schaefer I won't have——" the bride's face was scarlet. She bit her lip.
"Now I know you're going to say I'm a guest in your house and so you can't—and all that. But I'm not ashamed to say what you all know. That I'd be married to-day if it weren't for Sam Butler's mother who ought to have died fifteen years ago."
"Beck, you're crazy! Now stop it! If you're trying to be funny——"
"But I'm not. I'm trying to be serious. And you're all scared. Old Lady Butler—'Madame Butler' she insists on it! I could die!—is almost eighty-six, and Sam's crowding fifty. He's a smart business man—splendid mind—a whole lot superior to mine; I know that. And yet when he's with her—which is most of his spare time—he's like a baby in her hands. She makes a slave of him. She hates any girl he looks at. She's as jealous as a maniac. She tells him all sorts of things about me. Lies. He has to go out of the house to telephone me. Once I called him up at the house and he had to have the doctor in for her. That's the way she works it; tells him that if she dies it will be on his head, or something Biblical like that. Imagine! In this day! And Sam pays every cent of the household expenses and dresses his mother like a duchess. Look at me and my mother. We're always going around to summer resorts together. Just two pals! M-m-m! 'Don't tell me you're the mother of a big girl like that! Why, you look like sisters!' Big girl—me! That ought to have five chil—not that I want 'em ... now. But whenever I see one of those young mothers with her old daughter on a summer resort veranda I want to go up to the tired old daughter and say, 'Listen, gal. Run away with the iceman, or join a circus, or take up bare-legged dancing—anything to express yourself before it's too late.'"
They had frankly stopped their knitting now. The bride's lip was caught nervously between her teeth. Even thus her face still wore a crooked and uncertain smile—the smile of the harassed hostess whose party had taken an unmanageable turn for the worse.
It was Amy Stattler who first took up her knitting again, her face serene. "How about those of us who are doing constructive work? I suppose we're failures too!" She straightened a white cuff primly. "I have my Work."
"All right. Have it. But I notice that didn't keep you from wanting to marry that brainy little kike Socialist over on the West Side; and it didn't keep your people from interfering and influencing you, and making your life so miserable that you hadn't the spirit left to——"
But Amy Stattler's face was so white and drawn and haggard—she was suddenly so old—that even Beck Schaefer's mad tongue ceased its cruel lashing for a moment; but only for a moment.
Lottie Payson rolled her work into a neat bundle and jabbed a needle through it. She sat forward, her fine dark eyebrows gathered into a frown of pain and decent disapproval.
"Beck, dear, you're causing a lot of needless discomfort. You're probably nervous to-day, or something——"
"I'm nothing of the kind. Makes me furious to be told I'm nervous when I'm merely trying to present some interesting truths."
"The truth isn't always helpful just because it hurts, you know."
"A little truth certainly wouldn't hurt you, Lottie Payson. I suppose it wouldn't help any, either, to acknowledge that you're a kind of unpaid nurse-companion to two old women who are eating you alive!—when your friend Judge Barton herself says that you've got a knack with delinquent girls that would make you invaluable on her staff. And now that you're well past thirty I suppose your mother doesn't sometimes twit you with your maiden state, h'm? Don't tellme! As for Effie Case there——"
"Oh, my goodness Beck, spare muh! I've been hiding behind my knitting needle hoping you wouldn't see me. I know what's the matter with you. You've been sneaking up to those psycho-analysis lectures that old Beardsley's giving at Harper Hall. Shame on you! Nice young gal like you."
"Yes—and I know what's the matter with you, too, Effie. Why you're always lolling around at massage parlors and beauty specialists, sleeping away half the day in some stuffy old——"
With lightning quickness Effie Case wadded her work into a ball, lifted her arm, and hurled the tight bundle full at Beck Schaefer's head. It struck her in the face, rebounded, unrolled softly at her feet. Effie laughed her little irritating hysterical laugh. Beck Schaefer kicked the little heap of wool with a disdainful suede slipper.
"Well, I wouldn't have spilled all this if Cele had been willing to tell the truth. I said we were failures and we are because we've allowed some one or something to get the best of us—to pile up obstacles that we weren't big enough to tear down. We've all gone in for suffrage, and bleeding Belgium, and no petticoats, and uplift work, and we think we're modern. Well, we're not. We're a past generation. We're the unselfish softies. Watch the eighteen-year-olds. They've got the method. They're not afraid."
Lottie Payson laughed. Her face was all alight. "You ought to hear my niece Charley talk to me. You'd think I was eighteen and she thirty-two."
Beck Schaefer nodded vehemently. "I know those girls—the Charley kind. Scared to death of 'em. They're so sorry for me. And sort of contemptuous. Catch Charley marrying ten years too late, like Celia here, and missing all the thrill."
"I haven't!" cried the harassed Celia, in desperation. "I haven't! Orville's the grandest——"
"Of course he is. But you can't have any thrill about a man you've waited ten years for. Why won't you be honest!"
And suddenly the plump little silk-clad hostess stood up, her face working, her eyes bright with tears that would not wink away.
"All right, I'll tell you the truth."
"No, Cele—no!"
"Sit down, Celia. Beck's a little off to-day."
"Don't pay any attention to her. Waspish old girl, that's what——"
Beck regarded her victim between narrowed lids. "You're afraid."
"I'm not. Why should I be. Orville's the kindest man in the world. I thought so before I married him, and now I know it."
"Oh—kind!" scoffed Beck. "But what's that got to do with happiness? Happiness!"
"If you mean transports—no. Orville's fifty. He's set in his ways. I—I'm nearer thirty-seven than thirty-six. And at that I've only lied one year about my age—don't tell Orville. He's crazy about me. He just follows me around this flat like a—like a child. And I suppose that's really what he is to me now—a kind of big, wonderful child. I have to pamper him, and reason with him, and punish him, and coax, and love, and—tend him. I suppose ten years ago we'd—he'd——"
She stopped suddenly, with a little broken cry.
"Beck, you're a pig!" Lottie Payson's arms were about Celia. "In her own house, too, and her first party. Really you're too——"
A coloured maid stood in the doorway—a South Side Hebe—her ebony face grotesque between the lacy cap and apron with which Celia had adorned her for the day. She made mysterious signals in Celia's direction.
"'F yo' ladies come in ev'thin's all—" She smiled; a sudden gash of white in the black. The tantalizing scent of freshly made coffee filled the little flat. They moved toward the dining room, talking, laughing, pretending.
"Oh, how pretty!... Cele! A real party! Candles and everything.... What a stunning pattern—your silver. So plain and yet so rich.... My word! Chicken salad! Bang goes another pound!"
Chicken salad indeed. Little hot flaky biscuits, too, bearing pools of golden butter within. Great black oily ripe olives. Salted almonds in silver dishes. Coffee with rich yellow cream. A whipped-cream covered icebox cake.
"I think we ought to spank Beck and send her from the table. She doesn't deserve this."
At five-thirty, as they stood, hatted and ready for the street, chorusing their good-byes in the little hallway, a key clicked in the lock. Orville!
They looked a little self-conscious.
"Well, well, well! I've run into a harem!"
"We haven't left a thing for your dinner. And it was so good."
"Not running away because I'm home, are you?" His round face beamed on them. He smelled of the fresh outdoors, and of strong cigars, and of a vaguely masculine something that was a blending of business office and barber's lotion and overcoat. The Reading Club scented it, sensitively. Celia came over to him swiftly, there in the little hall, and slid one arm about his great waist. A plump man, Orville, with a round, kindly, commonplace face. He patted her silken shoulder. She faced the Reading Club defiantly, triumphantly. "What have you girls been talking about, h'mm?" Orville laughed a tolerant chuckling laugh. "You girls. Settled the war yet?"
Beck Schaefer threw up her chin a little. "We've been talking about you, if you really want to know."
He reeled. "Oh, my God! Cele, did you take the old man's part?"
Celia moved away from him then a little, her face flushing. Constraint fell upon the group. Lottie Payson stepped over to him then and put one hand on his broad shoulder. "She didn't need to take your part, Orville. We were all for you."
"Except me!" shrilled Beck.
"Oh, you!" retorted Orville, heavily jocular. "You're jealous." He rubbed his chin ruefully. "Wait till I've shaved, Beck, and I'll give you a kiss to make you happy."
"Orville!" But Celia's bearing was again that of the successful matron—the fortunate beloved woman.
Beck Schaefer took the others home in her electric. Lottie, seized with a sudden distaste for the glittering enamelled box elected to walk, though she knew it would mean being late.
"Figger?" Beck Schaefer asked, settling her own plump person in the driver's seat.
"Air," Lottie answered, not altogether truthfully; and drew a long breath. She turned away from the curb. The electric trundled richly off, its plate glass windows filled with snugly tailored shoulders, furs, white gloves, vivid hats. Lottie held one hand high in farewell, palm, out, as the glittering vehicle sped silently away, lurched fatly around a corner and was gone.