"For that matter, I think it's so foolish to bother about Sunday dinner. We always get up later on Sunday, and eat more for breakfast. Let's just have lunch this once. Let's try it. Forget about the leg of lamb or the roast beef——"
Mrs. Payson raised her eyebrows in the direction of the listening Hulda. "I'll leave that kind of thing to your sister Belle—this new idea of getting up at noon on Sunday and then having no proper Sunday dinner. We've always had Sunday dinners in this house and we always will have as long as I'm head of the household."
"Well, I just thought——" Lottie released the swinging door. She came back into the dining room and glanced at herself in the sideboard mirror. Lottie was the kind of woman who looks well in the morning. A clear skin, a clear eye, hair that springs cleanly away from the temples. This morning she looked more than usually alert. A little half-smile of anticipation was on her lips. The lowering weather, her mother's dourness, Hulda's slightly burned toast—she had allowed none of these things to curdle the cream of her morning's adventure. She was wearing her suit and furs and the small velvet hat whose doom Belle had pronounced the evening before. As she drew on her gloves her mother entered the dining room.
"I'll be back by noon, surely." Mrs. Payson did not answer. Lottie went down the long hall toward the front door. Her mother followed.
"Going to Belle's?"
"Yes. I'll have to hurry."
At the door Mrs. Payson flung a final command.
"You'd better go South Park to Grand."
Lottie had meant to. It was the logical route to Belle's. She had taken it a thousand times. Yet now, urged by some imp of perversity, she was astonished to hear herself saying, "No, I'm going up Prairie to Fifty-first." The worst possible road.
She did not mind the wet gray wind as she clanked along in the little box-like contrivance, up Prairie Avenue, over Thirty-first, past gray stone and brick mansions whose former glory of façade and stone-and-iron fence and steps showed the neglect and decay following upon negro occupancy. It was too bad, she thought. Chicago was like a colossal and slovenly young woman who, possessing great natural beauty, is still content to slouch about in greasy wrapper and slippers run down at heel.