"... Most wonderful man ... happiest girl in the world ... I thought I knew him but I never dreamed he was so ... makes me feel so humble ... wonder what I have ever done to deserve such a prince among...."
Lottie told her mother and Aunt Charlotte about it that evening at dinner. It was very hot. Lottie had been ashamed of her own waspishness and irritability before dinner. She attributed it to the weather. Sometimes, nowadays, she wondered at her own manner. Was she growing persnickety, she asked herself, and fault-finding and crabbed? It seemed to her that the two old women were calmer, more tolerant, less fault-finding than she. She was the crotchety one. It annoyed Lottie to see Aunt Charlotte munching chocolates just before dinner. "Oh, Aunt Charlotte, for heaven's sake! Can't you wait until after dinner? You won't eat a thing."
"It doesn't matter if I don't, Lottie," Aunt Charlotte returned, mildly. Aunt Charlotte, at seventy-five, and rapidly approaching seventy-six, was now magnificently free. She defied life. What could it do to her! Nothing that it had not already done. So she ate, slept, talked as she pleased. A second youth seemed to have come upon her.
To-night, after Lottie's story of Beck Schaefer's marriage Mrs. Carrie Payson had said, with apparent irrelevance, "I won't be here always, Lottie. Neither will Aunt Charlotte." A little pause, then, "I wish you were settled, too."
Lottie deliberately pretended to misunderstand. "Settled, mama! My goodness I should think I'm settled enough!" She glanced about the quiet old room. But she knew what her mother meant, and resented it. Settled. Shelved. Her mother was thinking of Ben Gartz, Lottie knew.
Amazing things had happened to Ben Gartz in the last six months. He had sold the bus. In its place was a long, low, smooth-running, powerful gray car with special wheels and special tires and special boxes and flaps and rods. Ben Gartz was transformed from a wistful, fusty, and almost shabby middle-aged bachelor into a dapper beau in a tailored Palm Beach suit, saw-edge sailor, and silk hose. He carried a lemon-coloured cane. He had two rooms at an expensive Hyde Park hotel near the lake. He had had the Paysons and the Kemps to dinner there. There were lamps in the sitting room, and cushions, and a phonograph with opera records. Ben put on some of these after dinner and listened, his head on one side. He said it was the only way to live—with your own things around you. "My books," he said, and waved a hand toward a small sectional bookcase, in which thirty or forty volumes leaned limply against each other. One or two had slipped down and now lay supine on the roomy shelves. Lottie strolled over to the bookcase and glanced at the titles. The Mystery of the Purple Shroud. One Hundred Ways to Use the Chafing Dish. Eat and Grow Thin. Ben Gartz's waist line had been one of the first things about him to register a surprising change. Though his method of living had expanded his girth had decreased. He made no secret of his method. "A Turkish bath once a week," he said. "No sugar, no butter, no sweets or starches of any kind. And I feel better for it. Yessir! I never felt so well in my life. Sleep better. Walk better. Twenty-five pounds off already and I'll do another twenty-five before I'm through. I don't even miss the sugar in my coffee. I used to take saccharine. Not now. I don't even miss it. Take my coffee black. Got so now I think you miss the real flavour and spoil it using sugar and cream."
His face was a trifle jaundiced and haggard, one thought. The surprised muscles were showing their resentment at the suddenly withdrawn supports and cushions of fat.
Ben Gartz loved to play the host. He talked about the War, about business, about Chicago's part in the War, about his own part in it. He had bought bonds, sold bonds, given to this, that, the other. "Now take these Eyetalians, for instance. How long do you suppose they'd held out against the Austrians? Or the French, either, for that matter against the Germans? They were just about all in, now I'm here to tell you." His conversational facts were gleaned from the front-page headlines, yet he expounded them with a fervour and an assurance that gave them the effect of being inside information.
Of all his listeners Aunt Charlotte was the grimmest.
"Wasn't he interesting about the War?" Mrs. Carrie Payson had asked, after they had left.