"What for?"
"Meet the family."
"Oh, say, listen——"
You heard them talking and giggling a little together in the hall. Then they came down the hall and into the living room, these two young things; these two beautiful young things. And suddenly the others in the room felt old—old and fat and futile and done with life. The two stood there in the doorway a moment. The very texture of their skin; the vitality of their vigorous hair as it sprang away in a fine line from their foreheads; the liquid blue-white clearness of the eyeball; the poise of their slim bodies—was youth.
She was tall but he was taller. His hair had a warmer glint; it was almost red. In certain lights it was red. The faun type. Ears a little pointed. Contemptuous of systems, you could see that; metric or rhythmic. A good game of tennis, probably. Loathing golf. So graceful as to seem almost slouchy. Lean, composed, self-possessed. White flannel trousers for some athletic reason (indoor tennis, perhaps, at the gym); a loose great-coat buttoned over what seemed to be no shirt at all. Certainly not a costume for a Chicago March night. He wore it with a full dress air. And yet a certain lovable shyness.
Charley waved a hand in a gesture that somehow united him with the room—the room full of eyes critical, amused, appraising, speculative, disapproving.
"Mother and Dad you know, of course. Grandmother Payson, my Aunt Lottie—Lotta for short. Mr. Ben Gartz.... Oh, forgive me, Aunt Charlotte, I thought you'd gone. There in the corner—my great-aunt Charlotte Thrift.... This is Jesse Dick."
It is a terrible thing to see an old woman blush. The swift, dull almost thick red surged painfully to great-aunt Charlotte's face now, and her eyes were suddenly wide and dark, like a young girl's, startled. Then the red faded and left her face chalky, ghastly. It was as though a relentless hand had wrapped iron fingers around her heart and squeezed it and wrenched it once—tight and hard!—and then relaxed its grip. She peered at the boy standing there in the doorway; peered at him with dim old eyes that tried to pierce the veil of years and years and years. The others were talking. Charley had got her wraps from the hall, and was getting into her galoshes. This cumbersome and disfiguring footgear had this winter become the fad among university co-eds and South Side flappers. They wore galoshes on stormy days and fair. The craze had started during a blizzardy week in January. It was considered chic to leave the two top clasps or the two lower clasps open and flapping. The origin of this could readily be traced to breathless co-eds late for classes. All young and feminine Hyde Park now clumped along the streets, slim silken shins ending grotesquely in thick black felt-and-rubber.
Jesse Dick stooped now to assist in the clasping of Charley's galoshes. He was down on one knee. Charley, teetering a little, put one hand on his head to preserve her balance. He looked up at her, smiling; she looked down at him, smiling. Almost sixty years of life swept back over great-aunt Charlotte Thrift and left her eighteen again; eighteen, and hoop-skirted in her second-best merino, with a green-velvet bonnet and a frill of blond lace, and little muddied boots and white stockings.
She could not resist the force that impelled her now. She got up from her corner and came over to them. The talk went on in the living room. They did not notice her.