CHAPTER X
When she came out the fog was beginning to lift over the lake and there was even an impression of watery lemon-coloured sunshine behind the bank of gray. Lottie's spirits soared. As she stepped into the swaying old electric there came over her a little swooping sensation of freedom. It was good to be going about one's business thus, alone. No one to say, "Slower! Not so fast!" No one to choose the maelstrom of State and Madison streets as the spot in which to ask her opinion as to whether this sample of silk matched this bit of cloth. A licorice lane of smooth black roadway ahead. Down Hyde Park Boulevard and across to Drexel. Down the long empty stretch of that fine avenue at a spanking speed—spanking, that is, for the ancient electric whose inside protested at every revolution of the wheels. She negotiated the narrows of lower Michigan Avenue and emerged into the gracious sweep of that street as it widened at Twelfth. She always caught her breath a little at the spaciousness and magnificence of those blocks between Twelfth and Randolph. The new Field Columbian museum, a white wraith, rose out of the lake mist at her right. Already it was smudged with the smoke of the I. C. engines. A pity, Lottie thought. She always felt civic when driving down Michigan. On one side Grant Park and the lake beyond; on the other the smart shops. You had to keep eyes ahead, but now and then, out of the corner of them, you caught tantalising glimpses of a scarlet velvet evening wrap in the window of the Blackstone shop; a chic and trickily simple poiret twill in Vogue; the glint of silver as you flashed past a jeweller's; the sooted façade of the Art Institute. She loved it. It exhilarated her. She felt young, and free, and rather important. The sombre old house on Prairie ceased to dominate her for the time. What fun it would be to stay down for lunch with Emma Barton—wise, humourous, understanding Emma Barton. Maybe they could get hold of Winnie Steppler, too. Then, later, she might prowl around looking at the new cloth dresses for spring.
Well, she couldn't. That was all there was to it.
She parked the electric and entered the grim black pile that was the City Hall and County Building, threaded her way among the cuspidors of the dingy entrance hall, stepped out of the elevator on the floor that held Judge Barton's court: the Girls' Court. The attendant at the door knew her. There was no entering Judge Barton's court as a public place of entertainment. In the ante-room red-eyed girls and shawled mothers were watching the closed door in mingled patience and fear. Girls. Sullen girls, bold girls, frightened girls. Girls who had never heard of the Ten Commandments and who had broken most of them. Girls who had not waited for the apple of life to drop ripe into their laps but had twisted it off the tree and bitten deep into the fruit and found the taste of gall in their mouths. Tear-stained, bedraggled, wretched girls; defiant girls; silk-clad, contemptuous, staring girls. Girls who had rehearsed their rôles, prepared for stern justice in uniform. Girls who bristled with resentment against life, against law, against maternal authority. They did not suspect how completely they were to be disarmed by a small woman with a misleadingly mild face, graying hair, and eyes that—well, it was hard to tell about those eyes. They looked at you—they looked at you and through you.... What was that you had planned to say ... what was that you had.... Oh, for God's sakes, ma, shut up your crying! Between the girls in their sleazy silk stockings and the mothers in their shapeless shawls lay the rotten root of the trouble. New America and the Old World, out of sympathy with each other, uncomprehending, resentful. The girls in the outer room rustled, and twisted, and jerked, and sobbed, and whispered, and shrugged, and scowled; and stared furtively at each other. But the shawled and formless older women stood or sat animal-like in their patience, their eyes on the closed door.
Lottie wondered if she could pick Jennie from among them. She even thought of asking for her, but she quickly decided against that. Better to see Emma Barton first.
It lacked just five minutes of ten. Lottie nodded to the woman who guarded the door and passed through the little room in which Judge Barton held court, to the private office beyond. Never was less official-looking hall of justice than that little court room. It resembled a more than ordinarily pleasant business office. A long flat table on a platform four or five inches above the floor. Half a dozen chairs ranged about the wall. A vase of spring flowers—jonquils, tulips, mignonette—on the table. Not a carefully planned "woman's touch." Someone was always sending flowers to Judge Barton. She was that kind of woman. You were struck with the absence of official-looking papers, documents, files. All the paraphernalia of red tape was absent.
Judge Barton sat in the cubby-hole of an office just beyond this, a girl stenographer at her elbow. Outside the great window the City Hall pigeons strutted and purled. Bright-eyed and alert as an early robin, the judge looked up as Lottie came in. She took Lottie's hand in her own firm fingers.
"Well!" Then they smiled at each other, these two women. "You'll stay down and have lunch with me. I've the whole afternoon—Saturday."
"I can't."
"Of course you can. Why not?"
"I've got to be home by noon to take mother to market and to——"
"It sounds like nonsense to me," Emma Barton said, gently. And, somehow, it did sound like nonsense.
Lottie flushed like a school-girl. "I suppose it does——" she broke off, abruptly. "I came down to talk to you about Jennie. Jennie's the sister of Belle's housemaid, Gussie, and she's in trouble. Her case comes up before you this morning."
Emma Barton's eyes travelled swiftly over the charted sheets before her. "Jennie? Jennie?—Jeannette Kromek?"
"Jeannette."
"I see," said Judge Barton, just as Lottie had before her in Belle's kitchen that morning. She glanced at the chart of Jennie's case. A common enough case in that court. She listened as Lottie talked briefly. She knew the Jennie kind; Jennie in rebellion against a treadmill of working and eating and sleeping. Jennie, the grub, vainly trying to transform herself into Jeannette the butterfly. Excitement, life, admiration, pretty clothes, "a chance." That was what the Jeannettes vaguely desired: a chance.
Judge Barton did not waste any time on sentiment. She did not walk to the window and gaze out upon the great gray city stretched below. She did not say, "Poor little broken butterfly." She had not become head of this judicature thus. She said, "The world's full of Jennie—Jeannettes. I wonder there aren't more of them." The soft bright eyes were on Lottie. They said, "You're one, you know." But she did not utter the thought aloud. She glanced at her watch then (it actually hung from an old-fashioned chatelaine pinned near her right shoulder), rose and led the way into the larger room, followed by Lottie and the girl stenographer. She mounted the low platform, slipped into the chair at the desk.
She had placed the chart of Jennie's case uppermost on the table, was about to have the case summoned when the door flew open and Winnie Steppler entered. Doors always flew open before Winnie's entrance. White-haired, pink-cheeked as a girl, looming vast and imposing in her blue cloak and gray furs, she looked more the grande dame on an errand of mercy than a newspaper reporter on the job. She rarely got a story in Judge Barton's court because Judge Barton's girls' names were carefully kept out of the glare of publicity. The human quality in the place drew her; and her friendship and admiration for Emma Barton; and the off-chance. There might be a story for her. She ranged the city, did Winnie Steppler, for her stuff. Her friends were firemen and policemen, newsboys and elevator starters; movie ticket-sellers, news-stand girls, hotel clerks, lunch-room waitresses, manicures, taxi-drivers, street-sweepers, doormen, waiters, Greek boot-blacks—all that vast stratum of submerged servers over whom the flood of humanity sweeps in a careless torrent leaving no one knows what sediment of rich knowledge.
At sight of Lottie, Winnie Steppler's Irish blue eyes blazed. She affected a brogue, inimitable. "Och, but you're the grand sight and me a-sickening for ye these weeks and not a glimpse. You'll have lunch with me—you and Her Honour there."
"I can't," said Lottie.
"And why not, then!"
It really was beginning to sound a little foolish. Lottie hesitated. She fidgeted with her fingers, looked up smiling uncertainly. "I've"—with a rush—"I've got to be home by twelve to drive mother to market and to the West Side."
"Telephone her. Say you won't be home till two. It's no life-and-death matter, is it—the market and the West Side?"
Lottie tried to picture that driving force at home waiting complacently until she should return at two. "Oh, I can't! I can't!"
Winnie Steppler, the world-wise, stared at her a moment curiously. There had been a note resembling hysteria in Lottie's voice. "Why, look here, girl——"
"Order in the court!" said Judge Barton, with mock dignity. But she meant it. It was ten o'clock. Two probation officers came in. A bailiff opened the door and stuck his head in. Judge Barton nodded to him. He closed the door. You heard his voice in the outer room. "Jeannette Kromek! Mrs. Kromek! Otto Kromek!"
A girl in a wrinkled blue cloth dress, a black velvet tam o'shanter, slippers and (significant this) black cotton stockings. At sight of those black cotton stockings Lottie Payson knew, definitely, that beneath the top tawdriness of Jeannette was Jennie, sound enough. A sullen, lowering, rather frightened girl of seventeen. Her hair was bobbed. The style went oddly with the high-cheek-boned Slavic face, the blunt-fingered factory hands. With her was a shawled woman who might have been forty or sixty. She glanced about dartingly beneath lowered lids with quick furtive looks. An animal, trapped, has the same look in its eyes. The two stood at the side of the table facing Judge Barton.
"Where is Otto Kromek?"
"He didn't show up," the bailiff reported.
No case, then. But Judge Barton did not so state. She leaned forward a little toward the girl whose face was blotched and swollen with weeping.
"What's the trouble, Jennie?"
Jennie set her jaw. She looked down, looked up again. The brown eyes were still upon her, questioningly. "I——"
The shawled woman plucked at the girl's skirt and whispered fiercely in her own tongue.
"Le' me alone," hissed the girl, and jerked away.
Judge Barton turned toward the woman. "Mrs. Kromek, just stand away from Jennie. Let her talk to me. Afterward you can talk."
The two separated, glaring.
"Now then, Jennie, how did it all happen?"
The girl begins to speak. The older woman edges closer again to catch what the low voice says.
"We went ridin' with a couple fellas."
"Did you know them? Were they boys you knew?"
"No."
"How did you happen to go riding with them, Jennie?"
"We was walkin'——"
"We?"
"Me an' my girl friend. We was walkin'. These fellas was driving 'round slow. We seen 'em. An' they come up to the curb where we was passin' by an' asked us would we like to take a ride. Well, we didn't have nothin' else to do so——"
I-sez-to-him and he-sez-to-me. The drive. Terror. A fight in the car, the sturdy girls defending themselves fiercely. Home safe but so late that the usual tirade became abuse. They had said things at home ... well ... she'd show'm. She'd run away. She had taken the hundred to spite him—Otto.
"Why did you go, Jennie? You knew, didn't you?"
The girl's smouldering resentment flared into open hatred. "It's her. She's always a-yellin' at me. They're all yellin' all the time. I come home from work and right away they jump on me. Nothin' I do ain't right. I'm good and sick of it, that's what. Good and sick——" She was weeping again, wildly, unrestrainedly. The older woman broke into a torrent of talk in her own thick tongue. She grasped the girl's arm. Jennie wrenched herself free. "Yeh, you!" She turned again to Judge Barton, the tears streaming down her cheeks. She made no attempt to wipe them away. The Jennies of Judge Barton's court, so prone to tears, were usually poorly equipped for the disposal of them.
Emma Barton did not say, "Don't cry, Jennie." Without taking her eyes from the girl she opened the upper right-hand drawer of her desk, and from a neatly stacked pile of plain white handkerchiefs she took the topmost one, shook it out of its folds and handed it wordlessly to Jennie. As wordlessly Jennie took it and wiped her streaming eyes and blew her nose, and mopped her face. Emma Barton had won a thousand Jennies with a thousand neat white handkerchiefs extracted in the nick of time from that upper right-hand drawer.
"Now then, Mrs. Kromek. What's the trouble between you and Jennie? Why don't you get along, you two?"
Mrs. Kromek, no longer furtive, squared herself to state her grievance. Hers was a polyglot but pungent tongue. She made plain her meaning. Jennie was a bum, a no-good, a stuck-up. The house wasn't clean enough for Jennie. Always she was washing. Evenings she was washing herself always with hot water it was enough to make you sick. And Jennie was sassy on the boarders.
And, "I see," said Judge Barton encouragingly, at intervals, as the vituperative flood rolled on. "I see." Jennie's eyes, round with hostility, glared at her accuser over the top of the handkerchief. Finally, when the poison stream grew thinner, trickled, showed signs of stopping altogether, Judge Barton beamed understandingly upon the vixenish Mrs. Kromek. "I understand perfectly now. Just wait here, Mrs. Kromek. Jennie, come with me." She beckoned to Lottie. The three disappeared into the inner office. Judge Barton laid a hand lightly on the girl's shoulder. "Now then, Jennie, what would you like to do, h'm? Just talk to me. Tell me, what would you like to do?"
Jennie's hands writhed in the folds of her skirt. She twisted her fingers. She sobbed final dry, racking sobs. And then she rolled the judicial handkerchief into a tight, damp, hard little ball and began to talk. She talked as she had never talked to Ma Kromek. Translated, it ran thus:
At home there was no privacy. The house was full of hulking men; pipe-smoke; the smell of food eternally stewing on the stove; shrill or guttural voices; rough jests. Book-reading, bathing, reticence on Jennie's part were all shouted down as attempts at being "toney." When she came home from the factory at night, tired, nerve-worn, jaded, the house was as cluttered and dirty as it had been when she left it in the morning. The mother went with the boarders (this Jennie told as evenly and dispassionately as the rest). She had run away from home after the last hideous family fracas. She had taken the money in a spirit of hatred and revenge. She'd do it again. If they had let her go to school, as she had wanted to—she used to talk English all right, like the teacher—but you heard the other kind of talk around the house and at the factory and pretty soon you couldn't talk the right way. They made fun of you if you did. A business college course. That was what she wanted. She could spell. At school she could spell better than anyone in the room. Only they had taken her out in the sixth grade.
What to do with Jennie?
The two older women looked at each other over Jennie's head. The course in stenography could be managed simply enough. Judge Barton met such problems hourly. But what to do with Jennie in the meantime? She shrank from consigning to a detention home or a Girls' Refuge this fundamentally sound and decent young creature.
Suddenly, "I'll take her," said Lottie.
"How do you mean?"
"I'll take her home with me. We've got rooms and rooms in that barracks of ours. The whole third floor. She can stay for awhile. Anyway, she can't go back to that house."
The girl sat looking from one to the other, uncomprehending. Her hands were clutching each other tightly. Emma Barton turned to her. "What do you say, Jennie? Would you like to go home with Miss Payson here? Just for awhile, until we think of something else? I think we can manage the business college course."
The girl seemed hardly to comprehend. Lottie leaned toward her. "Would you like to come to my house, Jeannette?" And at that the first stab of misgiving darted through Lottie. "My house?" She thought of her mother.
"Yes," answered Jennie with the ready acquiescence of her class. "Yes."
And so it was settled, simply. Ma Kromek accepted the decision with dumb passiveness. One of the brothers would bring Jennie's clothes to the Prairie Avenue house. Jennie had only spent half of the stolen hundred. The unspent half she had returned to him. The rest she would pay back, bit by bit, out of her earnings. Winnie Steppler bemoaned her inability to make a feature story of Jennie—Jeannette. Lottie smiled at Jennie, and propelled her down the corridor and into the elevator, to the street. In her well-fitting tailor suit, and her good furs and her close little velvet hat, she looked the Lady Bountiful. The girl, shabby, tear-stained, followed. Lottie was racked with horrid misgivings. Why had she suggested it! What a mad idea! Her mother! She tried to put the thought out of her mind. She couldn't face it. And all the while she was unlocking the door of the electric, settling herself in the seat, holding out a hand to help Jennie's entrance. The watery sunshine of the early morning had been a false promise. It was raining again.
Out of the welter of State Street and Wabash, and into the clear stretch of Michigan once more she turned suddenly to look at Jennie and found Jennie looking fixedly at her. Jennie's eyes did not drop shiftily at this unexpected encounter. That was reassuring.
"Gussie works at my sister's," she told the girl, bluntly. "That's how I happened to be in court this morning when your case came up."
"Oh," said Jennie, accepting this as of a piece with all the rest of the day's happenings. Then, after a moment, "Is that why you said you'd take me? Gussie?"
"No, I didn't even think of Gussie at the time. I just thought of you. I didn't even think of myself." She smiled a little grimly. "I'm going to call you Jeannette, shall I?"
"Yeh. Jennie's so homely. What's your name?"
"Lottie."
Jeannette politely made no comment. Lottie found herself defending the name. "It's short for Charlotte, you know. My Aunt Charlotte lives with us. We'd get mixed up. My niece is named Charlotte, too. We call her Charley."
Jeannette nodded briskly. "I know. I seen her once. I was at Gussie's. Gussie told me. She's awful pretty.... She's got it swell.... You like my hair this way?" She whisked off the dusty velvet tam.
"I think I'd like it better the other way. Long."
"I'll let it grow. I can do it in a net so it looks like long." They rode along in silence.
What to say to her mother! She glanced at her watch. Eleven. Well, at least she wasn't late. They were turning into Prairie at Sixteenth. She was terrified at what she had done; furious that this should be so. She argued fiercely with herself, maintaining all the while her outwardly composed and dignified demeanour. "Don't be a silly fool. You're a woman of thirty-two—almost thirty-three. You ought to be at the head of your own household. If you were, this is what you'd have done. Well, then!" But she was sick with apprehension, even while she despised herself because it was so.
Jeannette was speaking again. "The houses around here are swell, ain't they?"
"Yes," Lottie agreed, absently. Her own house was a block away.
Jeannette's mind grasshoppered to another topic. "I can talk good if you keep telling me. I forget. Home and in the works everybody talks bum English. I learn quick."
"Well, then," said Lottie. "I shouldn't say 'swell' nor 'ain't'."
Jeannette thought a moment. "The—houses—around—here—are—grand—are—they—not?"
Suddenly Lottie reached over and covered the girl's hand with her own.
Jeannette smiled back at her. She thought her a fine looking middle-aged person. Not a very swell dresser but you could see she had class.
"Here we are!" said Lottie aloud. The direct, clear-headed woman who had acted with authority and initiative only an hour before in the court room was now thinking, "Oh, dear! Oh,dear!" in anticipative agony. She stepped out of the electric. "Gussie'll be glad."
"Yeh—Gussie!" Jeannette's tone was not without venom. "She's her own boss. She's got it good. Sometimes for a whole month she didn't come home." She stared curiously at the grim old Prairie Avenue house. It was raining hard now. Lottie glanced quickly up at the parlour window. Sometimes her mother stood there, watching for her, impatient of any waiting. She was not there now. She opened the front door, the two entered—Jeannette the braver of the two.
"Yoo-hoo!" called Lottie with an airy assumption of cheeriness. Jeannette stood looking up and down the long dim hallway with wide ambient eyes. There was no answer to Lottie's call. She sped back to the kitchen.
"Where's mother?"
"She ban gone out."
"Out! Where? It's raining. Pouring!"
"She ban gone out."
Even in her horror at the thought of her rheumatism-stricken mother in the downpour she was conscious of a feeling of relief. It was the relief a condemned murderer feels whose hanging is postponed from to-day until to-morrow.
She came back to Jeannette. Oh,dear! "Come upstairs with me, Jeannette." Lottie ran up the stairs quickly, Jeannette at her heels. She went straight to Aunt Charlotte's room. Aunt Charlotte was asleep in her old plush armchair by the window. She often napped like that in the morning. She dropped off to sleep easily, sometimes dozing almost immediately after breakfast. It was light, fitful sleep. She started up, wide awake, as Lottie came in.
"Where's mother?"
Aunt Charlotte smiled grimly. "She bounced out the minute you left."
"But where?"
"Her rents and the marketing."
"But it's raining. She can't be out in the rain. Way over there!"
"She said she was going to take the street car.... What time is it, Lottie? I must have.... Who's that in the hall?" She stopped in the middle of a yawn.
"Jeannette, come here. This is Jeannette, Aunt Charlotte. Gussie's sister. You know—Gussie who works for Belle. I've brought Jeannette home with me."
"That's nice," said Aunt Charlotte, pleasantly.
"To live, I mean."
"Oh! Does your mother know?"
"No. I just—I just brought her home." Lottie put a hand on Aunt Charlotte's withered cheek. She was terribly near to tears. "Dear Aunt Charlotte, won't you take care of Jeannette; I'm going out after mother. Show her her room—upstairs; you know. And give her some hot lunch. On the third floor you know—the room."
Jeannette spoke up, primly. "I don't want to make nobody trouble."
"Trouble!" echoed Aunt Charlotte. She rose spryly to her feet, asked no explanation. "You come with me, Jeannette. My, my! How pretty your hair is cut short like that. So Gussie is your sister, h'm? Well, well." She actually pinched Jeannette's tear-stained cheek.
"The dear thing!" Lottie thought, harassed as she was. "The darling old thing!" And then, suddenly: "Sheshould have been my mother."
Lottie ran downstairs and into the electric. She jerked its levers so that the old vehicle swayed and cavorted on the slippery pavement.
She would drive straight over to the one-story buildings on west Halsted, near Eighteenth. Her mother usually went there first. It was a Polish settlement. Mrs. Payson owned a row of six stores occupied by a tobacconist, a shoemaker, a delicatessen, a Chinese laundry, a grocer, a lunch room. She collected the rents herself, let out bids for repairs, kept her own books. Lottie had tried to help with these last but she was not good at accounts. Unless carefully watched she mixed things up hopelessly. Mrs. Payson juggled account books, ledgers, check books, rental lists like an expert accountant. Eighteenth Street, as Lottie drove across it now, was a wallow of liquid mud, rain, drays, spattered yellow street-cars, dim drab-looking shops. The slippery car tracks were a menace to drivers. She had to go slowly. The row of Halsted Street buildings reached at last, Lottie ran in one store and out the other.
"Is my mother here?"
"She's gone."
"Has Mrs. Payson been here?"
"Long. She left an hour ago."
There were the other buildings on Forty-third Street. But she couldn't have gone way up there, Lottie told herself. But she decided to try them. On the way she stopped at the house. Her mother had not yet come in. She went on up to Forty-third, the spring rain lashing the glassed-in hood of the electric. Yes, her mother had been there and gone. Lottie was conscious of a little hot flame of anger rising, rising in her. It seemed to drum in her ears. It made her eyelids smart and sting. She set her teeth. She swung the car over to Gus's market on Forty-third. Her hands gripped the levers so that the ungloved knuckles showed white.
"It's a damned shame, that's what it is!" she said, aloud; and sobbed a little. "It's a damned shame, that's what it is. She could have waited. It's just pure meanness. She could have waited. I wish I was dead!"
It was as though the calm, capable, resourceful woman of the ten o'clock court room scene had never been.
"Gus, has my mother——?"
"She's just went. You can ketch her yet. I told her to wait till it let up a little. She was wetter'n a drowned rat. But not her! You know your ma! Wait nothin'."
Lottie headed toward Indiana Avenue and the car line. Her eyes searched the passers-by beneath their dripping umbrellas. Then she spied her, a draggled black-garbed figure, bundle laden, waiting on the corner for her car. Her left arm—the bad one—was held stiffly folded in front of her, close to her body. That meant pain. Her shoulders were hunched a little. Her black hat was slightly askew. Lottie noted, with the queer faculty one has for detail at such times, that her colour was slightly yellow. But as she peered up the street in vain hope of an approaching street car, her glance was as alert as ever. She walked forward toward the curb to scan the empty car tracks. Lottie noticed her feet. In the way she set them down; in their appearance of ankle-weakness and a certain indescribable stiffness that carried with it a pathetic effort at spryness there was, somehow, a startling effect of age, of feebleness. She toed in a little with weariness. A hot blur sprang to Lottie's eyes. She drew up sharply at the curb, flung open the door, was out, had seized the bundles and was propelling her mother toward the electric almost before Mrs. Payson had realised her presence.
"Mother dear, why didn't you wait!"
For a moment it looked as if Mrs. Payson meant to resist stubbornly. She even jerked her arm away, childishly. But strong as her will was, her aching body protested still more strongly. Lottie hoisted her almost bodily into the electric. She looked shrunken and ocherous as she huddled in a corner. But her face was set, implacable. The car sped down the rain-swept street. Lottie glanced sideways at her mother. Her eyes were closed. They seemed strangely deep-set in their sockets.
"Oh, mama——" Lottie's voice broke; the tears, hot, hurt, repentant, coursed down her cheeks—"why did you do it! You knew—you knew——"
Mrs. Carrie Payson opened her eyes. "You said Belle's hired girl's sister was more important than I, didn't you? Well!"
"But you knew I didn't——" she stopped short. She couldn't say she hadn't meant it. She had. She couldn't explain to her mother that she had meant that her effort to help Jeannette was her protest against stifled expression. Her mother would not have understood. It sounded silly and pretentious even in her unspoken thought. But deeper than this deprecatory self-consciousness was a new and growing consciousness of Self.
She remembered Jeannette; Jeannette installed in the third floor room, a member of the household. At the thought of breaking the news of her presence to her mother Lottie felt a wild desire to giggle. It was a task too colossal, too hopeless for seriousness. You had to tackle it smilingly or go down to defeat at once. Lottie braced herself for the effort. She told herself, dramatically, that if Jeannette went she, too, would go.
"I brought Jeannette home with me."
"Who?"
"Jeannette—Gussie's sister. The one who's had trouble with the family."
"Home! What for!"
"She's—she's a nice little thing, and bright. There wasn't any place to send her. We've got so much room."
"You must be crazy."
"Are you going to turn her out into the storm, mom, like the girl in the melodrama?"
Mrs. Payson was silent a moment. Then, "Does she know anything about housework? Belle's always saying her Gussie's such a treasure. I'm about sick of that Hulda. Wastes more every week than we eat. I don't see what theydowith it—these girls. If we used a pound of butter this last week we used five and I hardly touch——"
"Jeannette doesn't want to do housework. She wants to go to business college."
"Well, of course, if you're running a reform school."
But she made no further protest now. Lottie, peeling off her mother's wet clothing as soon as they entered the house, pleaded with her to go to bed.
She was startled when her mother agreed. Mrs. Payson had always said, "When I go to bed in the middle of the day you can know I'm sick." Now she crept stiffly between the covers of her big old-fashioned walnut bed with a groan that she tried to turn into a cough. An hour later they sent for the doctor. An acute arthritis attack. Lottie reproached herself grimly, unsparingly.
"I'll get up around four o'clock," Mrs. Payson said. "You don't find me staying in bed. Belle does enough of that for the whole family." At four she said, "I'll get up in time for dinner.... Where's that girl? Where's that girl that was so important, h'm? I want to see her."
She was in bed for a week. Lottie covered herself with reproaches.