Perhaps these two women, more than anything or anyone else, had influenced Lottie to intolerance of aimless diversion. Not that Lottie had much time for her own aimless diversion even if she had fancied it. Rheumatism of a painful and crippling kind had laid its iron fingers upon Carrie Payson. Arthritis, the doctors called it. It affected only the fingers of the left hand—but because of it the downtown real estate office was closed. The three women were home together now in the big old house on Prairie, and Mrs. Payson was talking of selling it and moving into an apartment out south. It was about this time, too, that she bought the electric—one of the thousands that now began to skim Chicago's boulevards—and to which Lottie became a galley slave. She sometimes thought humorously of the shiny black levers as oars and the miles of boulevard as an endless sea to which she was condemned. Don't think that Lottie Payson was sorry for herself. If she had been perhaps it would have been better for her. For ten years or more she had been so fully occupied in doing her duty—or what she considered her obvious duty—that she had scarcely thought of her obligations toward herself. If you had disturbing thoughts you put them out of your mind. And slammed the door on them. When she was twenty-nine, or thereabouts, she had read a story that stuck in her memory. It was Balzac's short story of the old maid who threw herself into the well. She went to Aunt Charlotte with it.
"Now that's a morbid, unnatural kind of story, isn't it?" she said.
Aunt Charlotte's forefinger made circles, round and round, on her black-silk knee. Lottie had read the story aloud to her. "No. It's true. And it's natural."
"I don't see how you can say so. Now, when you were about forty——"
"When I was thirty-five or forty I had you and Belle. To tend to, I mean, and look after. If I hadn't had you I don't say that I would have gone off with the butcher boy, but I don't say that I wouldn't. Every time I wiped your noses or buttoned you up or spatted your hands when you were naughty it was a—well—a——"
"A sort of safety valve, you mean?" Lottie supplied the figure for her.
"Yes. Between thirty-five and forty—that's the time to look out for. You can fool nature just so long, and then she turns around and hits back."
"But look at all the girls I know—women of my age, and older—who are happy, and busy and contented."
There came a soft look into the dark eyes beneath the heavy black brows. From the vantage point of her years and experience she pronounced upon her sex. "Women are wonderful, Lottie," she said. "Just wonderful. A good thing for the race that men aren't like 'em. In self-control, I mean, and that. Wouldn't be any race, I reckon."