It had been during the winter before the war—February, 1917—that Charley Kemp had announced one evening to her father and mother that she intended to marry Jesse Dick when she was twenty. That would be in June. He had got a job as feature writer with the Chicago News Bureau and he was acting as motion picture critic for one of the afternoon papers. His comment was caustic but highly readable. His writing in this new field was characterised by the same crude force that made his poetry a living thing.
"Well, was I right or wasn't I?" demanded Mrs. Payson of her daughter Belle. "Talking about her five children like a—like a hussy!"
"Hussies don't have five children," Belle retorted, meaninglessly.
Mrs. Payson endeavoured to arouse her daughter to the necessity for immediate action against this proposed madness of Charley's. "You've got to stop it, that's all."
"Stop it how?"
"How! By forbidding it, that's how."
Belle could even smile at that. "Oh, mother, aren't you quaint! Nowadays parents don't forbid girls marrying this man or that, any more than they lock them up in a high tower like the princess What's-her-name in the fairy tale."
"You let me talk to her," said Mrs. Carrie Payson. "I'll do a little plain speaking."
Her plain speaking consisted in calling Jesse Dick a butcher's boy and a good-for-nothing scribbler who couldn't earn a living. Charley heard her out, a steely light in her eyes.
She spoke quietly and with deadly effect. "You're my grandmother, but that doesn't entitle you to talk to me with the disrespect you've just shown."