"Oh, Nebraska!"
"Yes, ma'am."
"How do you like Chicago?"
"I like it fine." A quick glance at Jeannette. "Everybody here is certainly grand."
Now that Jeannette was regularly at dinner the silences that had tortured Lottie's nerves were banished quite. The girl chattered endlessly but engagingly, too. One of the girls at the office had gone and got married during the noon hour—did you see the parade on Michigan to-day?—that actress with the Liberty Loan speaker at the corner of Monroe and State had given a signed photograph with every bond purchased—there was a fur coat in Olson's window for only one hundred and fifty—all the girls were going to buy those short fur coats this winter.
"Mercy on us!" from Aunt Charlotte. Jeannette and Aunt Charlotte were great friends. Aunt Charlotte's room had, for Jeannette, something of the attraction of a museum. In it were all those treasures accumulated by a lonely woman throughout almost half a century of living in one house. Ribbons, flowers, buttons, photographs, scraps of lace, old hats, mounds of unused handkerchiefs and bottles of perfume and boxes of time-yellowed writing paper representing the birthdays and Christmases of years; old candy boxes; newspaper clippings; baby pictures of Lottie, Belle, Charley; family albums. There was always a bag of candy of the more durable sort—hard peppermints, or fruit drops. And, treasured of all, the patchwork silk quilt. When Belle and Lottie were little girls the patchwork quilt had been the covering of convalescence during the milder periods of childhood indispositions. At very sight of its prismatic folds now Lottie was whisked back twenty-five years to days of delicious languor on the sitting room sofa, the silk quilt across her knees, cups of broth and quivering rosy gelatines to tempt the appetite, and the button box for endless stringing and unstringing.
To-day, as Lottie passed Aunt Charlotte's room just before dinner she saw her sitting by the window with the silk quilt in her lap. Of late it had been packed away in one of the room's treasure boxes and brought out only for purposes of shaking and dusting.
Lottie entered and stood over Aunt Charlotte as she sat there in her chair by the window looking out on the ornate old houses across the way. "I haven't seen it in years." She passed her fingers over the shining surface of the silk and satin. Frayed squares and triangles marred many of the blocks now. A glistening butterfly still shone in yellow silk in one corner; a spider wove an endless web in another. Time had mellowed the vivid orange and purple and scarlet and pink until now the whole had the vague softness and subdued gleam of an ancient Persian carpet or an old cathedral window.
Aunt Charlotte looked down at it. One tremulous finger traced the pattern of wheels and circles and blocks. "I always thought I'd give it to the first one of the family that married. But Belle—of course not, in that grand apartment. For awhile I thought Charley and that young lad—I'd have liked to tell them how I came to make it. The boy would have liked to hear it. Jesse Dick. He'd have understood. But he's gone to war again. Jesse Dick has gone to war again. Oh, dear! Why didn't Charlotte marry him before he went?"
"She's wandering a little," Lottie thought, with a pang. "After all, she's very old. We haven't realised." Aloud she said, smiling, "And how about me, Charlotte Thrift? You're forgetting your old niece entirely."