"Yeh. Jennie's so homely. What's your name?"
"Lottie."
Jeannette politely made no comment. Lottie found herself defending the name. "It's short for Charlotte, you know. My Aunt Charlotte lives with us. We'd get mixed up. My niece is named Charlotte, too. We call her Charley."
Jeannette nodded briskly. "I know. I seen her once. I was at Gussie's. Gussie told me. She's awful pretty.... She's got it swell.... You like my hair this way?" She whisked off the dusty velvet tam.
"I think I'd like it better the other way. Long."
"I'll let it grow. I can do it in a net so it looks like long." They rode along in silence.
What to say to her mother! She glanced at her watch. Eleven. Well, at least she wasn't late. They were turning into Prairie at Sixteenth. She was terrified at what she had done; furious that this should be so. She argued fiercely with herself, maintaining all the while her outwardly composed and dignified demeanour. "Don't be a silly fool. You're a woman of thirty-two—almost thirty-three. You ought to be at the head of your own household. If you were, this is what you'd have done. Well, then!" But she was sick with apprehension, even while she despised herself because it was so.
Jeannette was speaking again. "The houses around here are swell, ain't they?"
"Yes," Lottie agreed, absently. Her own house was a block away.
Jeannette's mind grasshoppered to another topic. "I can talk good if you keep telling me. I forget. Home and in the works everybody talks bum English. I learn quick."