"Why—what——"
"You trumped my ace!"
CHAPTER IX
Every morning between eight-thirty and nine a boy from the Élite Garage on Twenty-sixth Street brought the Payson electric to the door. He trundled it up to the curb with the contempt that it deserved. Your self-respecting garage mechanic is contemptuous of all electric conveyances, but this young man looked on the Payson's senile vehicle as a personal insult. He manipulated its creaking levers and balky brakes as a professional pitcher would finger a soft rubber ball—thing beneath pity. As he sprang out of it in his jersey and his tight pants and his long-visored green cap he would slam its ancient door behind him with such force as almost to set it rocking on its four squat wheels. Then he would pass round behind it, kick one of its asphalt-gnawed rubber tires with a vindictive boot and walk off whistling back to the Élite Garage. Lottie had watched this performance a thousand times, surely. She was always disappointed if he failed to kick the tire. It satisfied something in her to see him do it.
This morning Lottie was up, dressed, and telephoning the Élite Garage before eight o'clock. She wanted to make an early start. She meant to use the electric in order to save time. Without it the trip between the Payson's house on Prairie Avenue and the Kemp's on Hyde Park Boulevard near the lake was a pilgrimage marked by dreary waits on clamorous corners for dirty yellow cars that never came.
Early as she was Lottie had heard Aunt Charlotte astir much earlier. She had not yet come down, however. Mrs. Payson had already breakfasted and read the paper. After Mrs. Payson had finished with a newspaper its page-sequence was irrevocably ruined for the next reader. Its sport sheet mingled with the want ads; its front page lay crumpled upon Music and the Drama. Lottie sometimes wondered if her own fondness for a neatly folded uncrumpled morning paper was only another indication of chronic spinsterhood. Aunt Charlotte had once said, as she smoothed the wrinkled sheets with her wavering withered fingers, "Reading a newspaper after you've finished with it, Carrie, is like getting the news three days stale. No flavour to it."
Lottie scarcely glanced at the headlines as she drank her coffee this morning. Her mother was doing something or other at the sideboard. Mrs. Payson was the sort of person who does slammy flappy things in a room where you happened to be breakfasting, or writing, or reading; things at which you could not express annoyance and yet which annoyed you to the point of frenzy. She lifted dishes and put them down. She rattled silver in the drawer. She tugged at a sideboard door that always stuck. She made notes on a piece of wrapping paper with a hard pencil and tapping sounds. All interspersed with a spasmodic conversation carried on in a high voice with Hulda in the kitchen, the swinging door of the pantry between them.
"Need any rice?"
"W'at?"
"Rice!"