Lottie Payson was striding home 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. She had come from what is known on the South Side as "spending the afternoon."
Of late years Lottie had given up this spending of afternoons. Choice and circumstances had combined to bring this about. Her interests had grown away from these women who had been her school-girl friends. The two women with whom she lived made her the staff on which they leaned more and more heavily. Lottie Payson was head of the household in everything but authority. Mrs. Carrie Payson still held the reins.
The afternoons had started as a Reading Club when Lottie was about twenty-five and the others a year or two older or younger. Serious reading. Yes, indeed. Effie Case had said, "We ought to improve our minds; not just read anything. I think it would be fine to start with the German poets; Gerty and those."
So they had started with Goethe and those but found the going rather rough. This guttural year had been followed by one of French conversation led by a catarrhal person who turned out to be Vermontese instead of Parisian, which accounted for their having learned to pronounce le as "ler." After this they had turned to Modern American Literature; thence, by a process of degeneration, to Current Topics. They had a leader for the Current Topics Class, a retired Madam Chairman. She grafted the front-page headlines onto the Literary Digest and produced a brackish fruit tasting slightly of politics, invention, scandal, dress, labor, society, disease, crime, and royalty. One day, at the last minute, when she had failed to appear for the regular meeting—grip, or a heavy cold—someone suggested, "How about two tables of bridge?" After that the Reading Class alternated between bridge and sewing. The sewing was quite individual and might range all the way from satin camisoles to huckaback towels; from bead bags to bedspreads. The talk, strangely enough, differed little from that of the personally-conducted Current Topics Class days. They all attended lectures pretty regularly; and symphony concerts and civic club meetings.
In the very beginning they had made a rule about refreshments. "No elaborate serving," they had said. "Just tea or coffee, and toast. And perhaps a strawberry jam or something like that. But that's all. Nobody does it any more." The salads, cakes, and ices of an earlier period were considered vulgar for afternoons. Besides, banting had come in, and these women were nearing thirty; some of them had passed it—an age when fat creeps slyly about the hips and arms and shoulder-blades and stubbornly remains, once ensconced. Still, this rule had slowly degenerated as had the club's original purpose. As they read less during these afternoons they ate more. Beck Schaefer discovered and served a new fruit salad with Hawaiian pineapple and marshmallows as its plot. When next they met at Effie Case's she served her salad in little vivid baskets made of oranges hollowed out, with one half of the skin cut away except for a strip across the top to form the basket's handle. After that there was no more tea and toast. After that, too, the attendance of certain members of the erstwhile Reading Club became more and more irregular and finally ceased altogether. These delinquents were the more serious-minded ones of the group. One became a settlement worker. Another went into the office of an advertising agency and gave all her time and thought to emphasising the desirability of certain breakfast foods, massage creams, chewing gum, and garters. Still another had become a successful Science Practitioner, with an office in the Lake Building and a waiting room always full of claims. As for Lottie Payson—her youth and health, her vigor and courage all went into the service of two old women. Of these the one took selfishly; the other reluctantly, protestingly. The Reading Club had long ago ceased to exist for Lottie.
In the morning she drove her mother to market in the ramshackle old electric. Mrs. Payson seldom drove it herself. The peculiar form of rheumatism from which she suffered rendered her left hand almost useless. The electric had been a fine piece of mechanism in its day but years of service had taken the spring from its joints and the life from its batteries. Those batteries now were as uncertain as a tired old heart that may stop its labored beating any moment. A balky starter and an unreliable starter, its two levers needed two strong hands with muscle-control behind them. Besides, one had to be quick. As the Paysons rumbled about in this rheumatic coach, haughty and contemptuous gas cars were always hooting impatiently behind them, nosing them perilously out of the way in the traffic's flood, their drivers frequently calling out ribald remarks about hearses.
In this vehicle drawn up at the curb outside the market Lottie would sit reading the Survey (Judge Barton's influence there) while her mother carried on a prolonged and acrimonious transaction with Gus. Thirty-first Street, then Thirty-fifth Street, had become impossible for the family marketing. There groceries and meat markets catered frankly to the Negro trade. Prosperous enough trade it seemed, too, with the windows piled with plump broilers and juicy cuts of ham. The Payson electric waited in Forty-third Street now.
Gus's red good-natured face above the enveloping white apron became redder and less good-natured as Mrs. Payson's marketing progressed. New potatoes. A piece of rump for a pot-roast. A head of lettuce. A basket of peaches. Echoes floated out to Lottie waiting at the curb.
"Yeh, but looka here, Mis' Payson, I ain't makin' nothin' on that stuff as it is. Two three cents at the most. Say I gotta live too, you know.... Oh, you don't want that, Mis' Payson. Tell you the truth, they're pretty soft. Now here's a nice fresh lot come in from Michigan this morning. I picked 'em out myself down on South Water."
Mrs. Payson's decided tones: "They'll do for stewing."