"And I say you won't. France! What for! What for!"
Aunt Charlotte stood up, her face working, her head shaking. She pointed a lean aspen finger at her sister. "Carrie Thrift, don't you stand in the way of her going. Don't you! Don't you!"
Even then Mrs. Payson's middle-class horror of being overheard by the servant in the kitchen triumphed over her anger. "Come on into the sitting room. I'm not going to have that girl listening." She went to the swinging door. "We're through, Liela. You can clear off." She eyed the girl sharply before the door swung back.
They marched into the sitting room in silence.
In the two weeks that followed Mrs. Payson never once relaxed her opposition. Yet she insisted on accompanying Lottie throughout the orgy of shopping that followed—scouring the stores for such commonplace articles as woollen stockings, woollen underwear, heavy shoes, bed socks, flannel bloomers, soap, hot water bag, candles, sugar, pins, needles. Sometimes her mother barely spoke to Lottie for hours. Yet strangely enough, Lottie had twice heard her say to a sympathetic clerk when she did not know Lottie was listening: "Yes, they are for my daughter who's going to France.... Yes, it is hard, but we've got to do our share." There had even been a ring of pride in her voice. Lottie heard her speaking at the telephone. "We'll miss her; but they need her more than we do." One could almost call it bragging.
She had a strangely detached feeling about it all. When Henry spoke gravely of U-boats she felt immune, as when one hears of typhus in China. This person who was going to France was not Lottie Payson at all—Lottie Payson, aged thirty-three, of Prairie Avenue, Chicago, Illinois. This was some new, selfish, driven being to whom all the old familiar things and people—the house, the decrepit electric, Aunt Charlotte, her mother, Emma Barton—were remote and inconsequential.
She and Charley had had one brief honest moment together. "I wanted to go too," Charley had said. "I do still. But I'm not going. I want to see Jesse. I want him so much that sometimes I find myself doing things that I thought only women in novels did. Stretching out my arms to him in the dark.... The girls of my sort who are going are going for the excitement of it—for the trip, you might almost say. Oh, I know a lot of women—thousands—are moved by the finest kind of patriotism. But—well, for example, that pretty Olive Banning who's in our advertising department. She's going. She says all the men are over there."
The night before leaving, Lottie Payson suffered that agony of self-reproach and terror which unaccustomed travellers feel who are leaving all that is dear and safe and familiar. She lay there in bed in her quiet room and great waves of fear and dread swept over her—not fear of what she was going to, but of what she was leaving behind.
She sat up in bed. Listened. If only she might hear some sound to break the stillness—the grinding of a Cottage Grove avenue car—the whistle of an Illinois Central train. Suddenly she swung her legs over the side of the bed, thrust her feet into slippers and stole down the hall to her mother's room. She wanted to talk to her. She'd be awake; awake and sitting up, alone and fearful, just as she herself was. Her mother's door was open. The room was dark, quite. Lottie peered in, sure of a little breathless silence that should precede her mother's whispered, "Is that you, Lottie?" But from within the room came a sleeper's breathing, deep, full, regular. Her mother was asleep. Her mother was asleep! The knowledge hurt her, angered her. She ought to be awake—awake and fearful. Lottie leaned against the doorsill and pitied herself a little. An occasional strangled snore came from the bed. "I should have gone years ago," Lottie told herself.
She turned back to her room, not taking the trouble to tiptoe now. Past Aunt Charlotte's room.