"I'll stay young with them. And I'll watch for mistakes. I know the world. I ought to. For that matter, I'd as soon they never married."
Charlotte would flare into sudden and inexplicable protest. "You let them live their own lives, the way they want to, good or bad. How do you know the way it'll turn out! Nobody knows. Let them live their own lives."
"Nonsense," from Carrie, crisply. "A mother knows. One uses a little common sense in these things, that's all. Don't you think a mother knows?" a rhetorical question, plainly, but:
"No," said Charlotte.
CHAPTER V
Anyone who has lived in Chicago knows that you don't live on the South Side. You simply do not live on the South Side. And yet Chicago's South Side is a pleasant place of fine houses and neat lawns (and this when every foot of lawn represents a tidy fortune); of trees, and magnificent parks and boulevards; of stately (if smoke-blackened) apartment houses; of children, and motor cars; of all that makes for comfortable, middle-class American life. More than that, booming its benisons upon the whole is the astounding spectacle of Lake Michigan forming the section's eastern boundary. And yet Fashion had early turned its back upon all this as is the way of Fashion with natural beauty.
We know that the Paysons lived south; and why. We know, too, that Carrie Payson was the kind of mother who would expect her married daughter to live near her. Belle had had the courage to make an early marriage as a way of escape from the Prairie avenue household, but it was not until much later that she had the temerity to broach the subject of moving north. She had been twenty when she married Henry Kemp, ten years her senior. A successful marriage. Even now, nearing forty, she still said, "Henry, bring me a chair," and Henry brought it. Not that Henry was a worm. He was merely the American husband before whom the foreign critic stands aghast. A rather silent, gray-haired, eye-glassed man with a slim boyish waistline, a fair mashie stroke, a keen business head, and a not altogether blind devotion to his selfish, pampered semi-intellectual wife. There is no denying his disappointment at the birth of his daughter Charlotte. He had needed a son to stand by him in this family of strong-minded women. It was not altogether from the standpoint of convenience that he had called Charlotte "Charley" from the first.
Thwarted in her secret ambition to move north, Belle moved as far south as possible from the old Prairie Avenue dwelling; which meant that the Kemps were residents of Hyde Park. Between the two families—the Kemps in Hyde Park and the Paysons in Prairie Avenue—there existed a terrible intimacy, fostered by Mrs. Carrie Payson. They telephoned each other daily. They saw one another almost daily. Mrs. Payson insisted on keeping a finger on the pulse of her married daughter's household as well as her own. During Charley's babyhood the innermost secrets of the nursery, the infant's most personal functions, were discussed daily via the telephone. Lottie, about sixteen at that time, and just finishing at Armour, usually ate her hurried breakfast to the accompaniment of the daily morning telephone talk carried on between her mother and her married sister.
"How are they this morning?... Again!... Well then give her a little oil.... Certainly not! I didn't have the doctor in every time you two girls had a little something wrong.... Oh, you're always having that baby specialist in every time she makes a face. We never heard of baby specialists when I was a.... Well, but the oil won't hurt her.... If they're not normal by to-morrow get him but.... You won't be able to go to the luncheon, of course.... You are! But if Charley's.... Well, if she's sick enough to have a doctor she's sick enough to need her mother at home.... Oh, all right. Only, if anything happens.... How was the chicken you bought yesterday?... Didn't I tell you it was a tough one! You pay twice as much over there in Hyde Park.... What are you going to wear to the luncheon?..."
Throughout her school years Lottie had always had a beau to squire her about at school parties and boy-and-girl activities. He was likely to be a rather superior beau, too. No girl as clear-headed as Lottie, and as intelligently fun-loving and merry, would tolerate a slow-witted sweetheart. The word sweetheart is used for want of a better. Of sweethearting there was little among these seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. Viewed through the wise eyes of to-day's adolescents they would have seemed as quaint and stiff as their pompadours and high collars.