Her tray awaited her on the table in the sun-parlour—fruit, toast, steaming hot chocolate. "I've got to go," Lottie kept murmuring and leaned in the doorway watching her. Charley attacked the food with a relish that gave you an appetite. She rolled an ecstatic eye at the first sip of chocolate. "Oo, hot! Sure you won't have some?" She demolished the whole daintily and thoroughly. As she sat there in the cruel morning light of the many-windowed little room she was as pink-cheeked and bright-eyed and scrubbed-looking as a Briggs boy ready for supper. You could see the fine pores of her skin.
Lottie began to button her coat. Charley chased a crumb of toast around her plate. "What, if any, do you think of him?"
Lottie had seen and met shoals of Charley's young men. "Suitors" was the official South Side name for them. But Charley had never asked Lottie's opinion of one of them.
"Charming youngster. I grew quite mooney, after you'd gone, thinking about him, and trumped mother's ace. He doesn't look like a poet—that is, poet."
"They never do. Good poets, I mean. I've often thought it was all for the best that Rupert Brooke—that Byron collar of his. Fancy by the time he became forty ... you really think he's charming?"
"So does your mother. Last night she was enthusiastic—about his work."
"M-m-m. Mother's partial to young poets."
Between Charley and her mother there existed an unwritten code. Charley commanded whole squads of devoted young men in assorted sizes, positions, and conditions. Young men who liked country hikes and wayside lunches; young men who preferred to dance at the Blackstone on Saturday afternoons; young men who took Charley to the Symphony concerts; young men who read to her out of books. And Mrs. Henry Kemp, youngish, attractive, almost twenty years of married life with Henry Kemp behind her, relished a chat with these slim youngsters. A lean-flanked graceful crew they were, for the most part, with an almost feline co-ordination of muscle. When they shook hands with you their grip drove the rings into your fingers. They looked you in the eye—and blushed a little. Their profiles would have put a movie star to shame. Their waists were slim as a girl's (tennis and baseball). They drove low-slung cars around Hyde Park corners with death-defying expertness. Nerveless; not talkative and yet well up on the small-talk of the younger set—Labour, Socialism, sex, baseball, Freud, psychiatry, dancing and—just now—the War. Some were all for dashing across to join the Lafayette Escadrille. Belle Kemp would have liked to sit and talk with these young men—talk, and laugh, and dangle her slipper on the end of her toe. Charley knew this. And her mother knew she knew. No pulling the wool over Charley's eyes. No pretending to play the chummy young mother with her. "Pal stuff."
So, then, "M-m-m," said Charley, sipping the last of her chocolate. "Mother's partial to young poets."
Lottie had to be off. She cast a glance down the hall. "Do you suppose she's really asleep still? I'd like to talk to her just a minute."