Mrs. Carrie Payson said nothing. She did not issue dinner invitations thus, helter-skelter. She did not look displeased, though.
"Well, how's business?"
Great-aunt Charlotte made a little clucking sound between tongue and palate and prepared to drift from the room. She had a knack of drifting out of the room—evaporating, almost. You looked up, suddenly, and she was not there. Outside there sounded the sharp bleat of a motor horn—a one-lung motor horn. Two short staccato blasts followed by a long one. A signal, certainly.
"The poet, Charley," said Henry Kemp; and laughed his big kind laugh.
"Ask him in," Mrs. Payson said. "Aren't you going to ask your young man to come in?" Charley was preparing to go.
"What for?" she asked now.
"To meet the family. Unless you're ashamed of him. When I was a girl——"
Great-aunt Charlotte sat back again, waiting.
"All right," said Charley. "He'll hate it." She walked across the room smiling; opened the door and called out to the bleat in the blackness:
"Come on in!"