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.