...."
When Charley read that one, as she often did, she would beat with her hard young fist on her knee and cry impotent tears of rage at the uselessness of it all.
They made a book of his poems and brought it out in the autumn, just before the armistice. A slim book of poems. There had been so few of them.
CHAPTER XVIII
Charley was away when Lottie came home in February, following that historic hysteric November. Charley was in Cincinnati, Ohio, dancing with the Krisiloff Russian ballet. They were playing Cincinnati all that week, and the future bookings included Columbus, Cleveland, Toledo, Akron. Charley wrote that they would be back in Chicago for two weeks at the end of March, showing one week at the Palace and one at the Majestic.
"... And what's all this," she wrote Lottie, "about your having brought back a French war orphan? There never was such a gal for orphans. Though I must say you did pretty well with Jeannette. Mother wrote me about her wedding. But this orphan sounds so young. And a girl, too. I'm disappointed. While you were about it it seems to me you might have picked a gentleman orphan. We certainly need some men in our family. Send me a picture, won't you? I hope she isn't one of those awfully brune French babies that look a mixture of Italian and Yiddish and Creole. In any case I'm going to call her Coot. Are you really going to adopt her? That would be nice, but mad. Did Grandmother raise an awful row? I'm sorry she's feeling no better. Mother wrote you have a trained nurse now...."
Lottie's homecoming had been a subdued affair. She had slipped back into the family life of the old house on Prairie Avenue as if those months of horror and exaltation and hardship had never been. But there was a difference. Lottie was the head of the household now.
Mrs. Carrie Payson lay upstairs in the second-floor front bedroom, a strangely flat outline beneath the covers of the great walnut bed. She made a bad patient. The eyes in the pointed sallow face were never still. The new nurse said, almost automatically now, "Don't try to talk, Mrs. Payson. You want to save your strength."
"Strength! How can I ever get my strength lying here! I never stayed in bed. I'll get up to-morrow, doctor or no doctor. Everything's going to rack and ruin. I engaged the painters for the first of March. There's repairing to do on everything in the spring. Did they send in the bill for fixing the shed?"
But when next day came she threatened to get up to-morrow. And next day. Her will still burned, indomitable, but the heart refused to do its bidding. The thing they called rheumatism had leaped and struck deep with claws and fangs, following a series of disturbing events.