An exhilarating but breathless business—this catching up with Lottie; Lottie of the fine straight back, the short sturdy legs, the sensible shoes, the well-tailored suit and the elfish exterior. All these items contributed to the facility with which she put the long Chicago blocks behind her—all, that is, except the last. An unwed woman of thirty-odd is not supposed to possess an elfish exterior; she is expected to be well-balanced and matter-of-fact and practical. Lottie knew this and usually managed to keep the imp pretty well concealed. Yet she so often felt sixteen and utterly irresponsible that she had to take brisk walks along the lake front on blustery days, when the spray stung your cheeks; or out Bryn Mawr way or even to Beverly Hills where dwellings were sparse and one could take off one's hat and venture to skip, furtively, without being eyed askance. This was supposed to help work off the feeling—not that Lottie wanted to work it off. She liked it. But you can't act Peter Pannish at thirty-two without causing a good deal of action among conservative eyebrows. Lottie's mother, Mrs. Carrie Payson, would have been terribly distressed at the thought of South Side eyebrows elevated against a member of her household. Sixty-six years of a full life had taught Mrs. Carrie Payson little about the chemistry of existence. Else she must have known how inevitably a disastrous explosion follows the bottling up of the Lotties of this world.
On this particular March day the elf was proving obstreperous. An afternoon spent indoors talking to women of her own age and position was likely to affect Lottie Payson thus. Walking fleetly along now, she decided that she hated spending afternoons; that they were not only spent but squandered. Beck Schaefer had taken the others home in her electric. Lottie, seized with a sudden distaste for the glittering enameled box with its cut-glass cornucopia for flowers (artificial), its gray velvet upholstery and tasseled straps, had elected to walk, though she knew it would mean being late.
"Figger?" Beck Schaefer had asked, settling her own plump person in the driver's seat.
"Air," Lottie had answered, not altogether truthfully; and drew a long breath. She turned away from the curb. The electric trundled richly off, its plate-glass windows filled with snugly tailored shoulders, furs, white gloves, vivid hats. Lottie held a hand high in farewell, palm out, as the gleaming vehicle sped silently away, lurched fatly around a corner, and was gone.
So she strode home now, through the early evening mist, the zany March wind buffeting her skirts—no, skirt: it is 1916 and women are knicker-bockered underneath instead of petticoated—and the fishy smell that was Lake Michigan in March; the fertilizer smell that was the Stockyards when the wind was west; and the smoky smell that was soft coal from the I. C. trains and a million unfettered chimneys, all blending and mellowing to a rich mixture that was incense to her Chicago-bred nostrils.
She was walking rapidly and thinking clearly, if disconnectedly:
"How we lied to each other this afternoon! Once or twice, though, we came nearer the truth than was strictly comfortable.... Beck's bitter.... There! I forgot Celia's recipe for that icebox cake after all.... Beck's legs ... I never saw such—uh—tumultuous legs ... gray silk stockings ought to be prohibited on fat legs; room seemed to be full of them.... That's a nice sunset. I'd love to go over to the lake just for a minute.... No, guess I'd better not with the folks coming to dinner.... People always saying Chicago's ugly when it's really.... Of course the Loop is pretty bad.... Tomorrow'd be a good day to go downtown and look at blue serges ... a tricotine I think.... I wonder if mother will want to go.... I do hope this once...."
Here Lottie drew a deep breath; the kind of breathing that relieves stomach nerves. She was so sure that mother would want to go. She almost always did.
Here we are, striding briskly along with Lottie Payson, while great-aunt Charlotte, a wistful black-silk figure, lingers far behind. We are prone to be impatient of black-silk figures, quite forgetting that they once were slim and eager white young figures in hoop-skirts that sometimes tilted perilously up behind, displaying an unseemly length of frilled pantalette. Great-aunt Charlotte's skirts had shaped the course of her whole life.
Charlotte Thrift had passed eighteen when the Civil War began. There is a really beautiful picture of her in her riding habit, taken at the time. She is wearing a hard-boiled hat with a plume, and you wonder how she ever managed to reconcile that skirt with a horse's back. The picture doesn't show the color of the plume but you doubtless would know. It is a dashing plume anyway, and caresses her shoulder. In one hand she is catching up the folds of her voluminous skirt, oh, ever so little; and in the other, carelessly, she is holding a rose. Her young face is so serious as to be almost severe. That is, perhaps, due to her eyebrows which were considered too heavy and dark for feminine beauty. And yet there is a radiance about the face, and an effect of life and motion about the young figure that bespeaks but one thing. Great-aunt Charlotte still has the picture somewhere. Sometimes, in a mild orgy of "straightening up" she comes upon it in its pasteboard box tucked away at the bottom of an old chest in her bedroom. At such times she is likely to take it out and look at it with a curiously detached air, as though it were the picture of a stranger. It is in this wise, too, that her dim old eyes regard the world—impersonally. It is as though, at seventy-four, she no longer is swayed by emotions, memories, people, events. Remote, inaccessible, immune, she sees, weighs, and judges with the detached directness of a grim old idol.