"All right. 'S for you to say. You got to eat 'em, not me. On'y don't come around to-morrow tellin' me they was no good."
Her purchases piled on the leather-upholstered front seat of the electric, Mrs. Payson would be driven home, complaining acidly. This finished Gus for her. Robber! Twenty-seven cents for lamb stew!
"But mama, Belle paid thirty-two cents last week. I remember hearing her say that lamb stew was seven or eight cents two or three years ago and now it's thirty-two or thirty——"
"Oh, Belle! I'm surprised she ever has lamb stew. Always running short on her allowance with her sirloins and her mushrooms and her broilers. I ran a household for a whole month on what she uses in a week, when I was her age. I don't know how Henry stands it."
This ceremony of marketing took half the morning. It should have required little more than an hour. On arriving home Mrs. Payson usually complained of feeling faint. Her purchases piled on the kitchen table, she would go over them with Hulda, the maid-servant. "Put that lettuce in a damp cloth." The maid was doing it. "Rub a little salt and vinegar into that pot roast." The girl had intended to. "You'll have to stew those peaches." That had been apparent after the first disdainful pressing with thumb and forefinger. By this time Hulda's attitude was the bristling one natural to any human being whose intelligence has been insulted by being told to do that which she already had meant to do. Mrs. Payson, still wearing her hat (slightly askew now) would accept the crackers and cheese, or the bit of cold lamb and slice of bread, proffered by Lottie to fend off the "faintness." Often Mrs. Payson augmented this with a rather surprising draught of sherry in a tumbler, from the supply sent by her son-in-law Henry Kemp.
On fine afternoons Lottie often drove her mother and Aunt Charlotte to Jackson Park, drawing up at the curb along the lake walk. A glorious sight, that panorama. It was almost like being at sea, minus the discomfort of travel. The great blue inland ocean stretched before them, away, and away, and away until it met the sky. For the most part the three women did nothing. Mrs. Payson had always hated sewing. Great-aunt Charlotte sometimes knitted. Her eyes were not needed for that. But oftenest she sat there gazing out upon the restless expanse of Lake Michigan, her hands moving as restlessly as the shifting ageless waters. Great-aunt Charlotte's hands were seldom still. Always they moved over her lap, smoothing a bit of cloth, tracing an imaginary pattern with a wrinkled parchment forefinger; pleating a fold of her napkin when at table. Hands with brown splotches on the backs. Moving, moving, and yet curiously inactive. Sometimes Lottie read aloud, but not often. Her mother was restless at being read aloud to; besides, she liked stories with what is known as a business interest. Great-aunt Charlotte liked romance. No villain too dastardly—no heroine too lovely and misunderstood—no hero too ardent and athletic for Aunt Charlotte's taste. She swallowed them, boots, moonlight, automobiles, papers and all. "Such stuff!" Mrs. Carrie Payson would say.
The conversation of the three women sitting there in the little glass-enclosed box was desultory, unvital. They had little to say to one another. Yet each would have been surprised to learn what a reputation for liveliness and wit the other had in her own circle. Lottie was known among "the girls" to be mischievous and gay; Carrie Payson could keep a swift and keen pace in conversation with a group of business men, or after a hand at bridge with women younger than she (Mrs. Payson did not care for the company of women of her own age); Great-aunt Charlotte's sallies and observations among her septuagenarian circle often brought forth a chorus of cackling laughter. Yet now:
"Who's that coming along past the Iowa building?" (Relic of World's Fair days.)
"I can't tell from here, mama."
"Must be walking to reduce, with that figure, on a day like this. It's that Mrs. Deffler, isn't it, that lives near Belle's? No, it isn't. She's too dark. Yes it ... no...."