Samuel Payson was destined to be a junior partner. Everything about him was deferential, subservient. The very folds of his clothes slanted away from you. He was as oblique and evasive as Isaac Thrift was upright and forthright. In conversation with you he pronounced your name at frequent intervals. Charlotte came to dread it: "Yes, Miss Charlotte.... Do you think so, Miss Charlotte?... Sit here, Miss Charlotte...." It was like a too-intimate hand on your shrinking arm.
The fashion for men of parting the hair in the middle had just come in. Samuel Payson parted his from forehead to nape of neck. In some mysterious way it gave to the back of his head an alert facial expression very annoying to the beholder. He reminded Charlotte of someone she had recently met and whom she despised; but for a long time she could not think who this could be. She found herself staring at him, fascinated, trying to trace the resemblance. Samuel Payson misinterpreted her gaze.
Isaac and Hetty Thrift had too late relaxed their vigilant watch over Charlotte. It had taken them all these years to realize that they were guarding a prisoner who hugged her chains. Wretched as she was (in a quiet and unobtrusive way) there is the possibility that she would have been equally wretched married to a Hardscrabble Dick. Charlotte's submission was all the more touching because she had nothing against which to rebel. Once, in the very beginning, Mrs. Thrift, haunted by something in Charlotte's eyes, had said in a burst of mingled spleen and self-defense:
"And why do you look at me like that, I should like to know! I'm sure I didn't kill your young man at Donelson. You're only moping like that to aggravate me; for something that never could have been, anyway—thank goodness!"
"He wouldn't have been killed," Charlotte said, unreasonably, and with conviction.
Had they been as wise and understanding as they were well-meaning, these two calvinistic parents might have cured Charlotte by one visit to the Dicks' Hardscrabble kitchen, with a mangy cur nosing her skirts; a red-faced hostess at the washtub; and a ruined, battered travesty of the slim young rhyme-making Jesse Dick there in the person of old Pete Dick squatting, sodden, in the doorway.
As the years went on they had, tardily, a vague and sneaking hope that something might happen among the G.A.R. widowers of Chicago's better families. During the reunions of Company I and Company E Charlotte generally assisted with the dinner or the musical program. She had a sweet, if small, contralto with notes in it that matched the fine dark eyebrows. She sang a group of old-fashioned songs: When You and I Were Young, Maggie; The Belle of Mohawk Vale; and Sleeping I Dream, Love. Charlotte never suspected her parents' careful scheming behind these public appearances of hers. Her deft capable hands at the G.A.R. dinners, her voice lifted in song, were her offerings to Jesse Dick's memory. Him she served. To him she sang. And gradually even Isaac and Hetty Thrift realized that the G.A.R. widowers were looking for younger game; and that Charlotte, surrounded by blue-uniformed figures, still was gazing through them, past them, into space. Her last public appearance was when she played the organ and acted as director for Queen Esther, a cantata, which marked rather an epoch in the amateur musical history of the town. After that she began to devote herself to her sister's family and to her mother.
But all this was later. Charlotte, at thirty, still had a look of vigor, and of fragrant (if slightly faded) bloom, together with a little atmosphere of mystery of which she was entirely unconscious; born, doubtless, of years of living with a ghost. Attractive qualities, all three; and all three quite lacking in her tart-tongued and acidulous younger sister, despite that miss's ten-year advantage. Carrie was plain, spare, and sallow. Her mind marched with her father's. The two would discuss real estate and holdings like two men. Hers was the mathematical and legal-thinking type of brain rarely found in a woman. She rather despised her mother. Samuel Payson used to listen to her with an air of respectful admiration and attention. But it was her older sister to whom he turned at last with, "I thought perhaps you might enjoy a drive to Cleaversville, since the evening's so fine, Miss Charlotte. What do you say, Miss Charlotte?"
"Oh, thank you—I'm not properly dressed for driving—perhaps Carrie——"
"Nonsense!" Mrs. Thrift would interpose tartly.