"That's nice," said Aunt Charlotte, pleasantly.
"To live, I mean."
"Oh! Does your mother know?"
"No. I just—I just brought her home." Lottie put a hand on Aunt Charlotte's withered cheek. She was terribly near to tears. "Dear Aunt Charlotte, won't you take care of Jeannette; I'm going out after mother. Show her her room—upstairs; you know. And give her some hot lunch. On the third floor you know—the room."
Jeannette spoke up, primly. "I don't want to make nobody trouble."
"Trouble!" echoed Aunt Charlotte. She rose spryly to her feet, asked no explanation. "You come with me, Jeannette. My, my! How pretty your hair is cut short like that. So Gussie is your sister, h'm? Well, well." She actually pinched Jeannette's tear-stained cheek.
"The dear thing!" Lottie thought, harassed as she was. "The darling old thing!" And then, suddenly: "She should have been my mother."
Lottie ran downstairs and into the electric. She jerked its levers so that the old vehicle swayed and cavorted on the slippery pavement.
She would drive straight over to the one-story buildings on west Halsted, near Eighteenth. Her mother usually went there first. It was a Polish settlement. Mrs. Payson owned a row of six stores occupied by a tobacconist, a shoemaker, a delicatessen, a Chinese laundry, a grocer, a lunch room. She collected the rents herself, let out bids for repairs, kept her own books. Lottie had tried to help with these last but she was not good at accounts. Unless carefully watched she mixed things up hopelessly. Mrs. Payson juggled account books, ledgers, check books, rental lists like an expert accountant. Eighteenth Street, as Lottie drove across it now, was a wallow of liquid mud, rain, drays, spattered yellow street-cars, dim drab-looking shops. The slippery car tracks were a menace to drivers. She had to go slowly. The row of Halsted Street buildings reached at last, Lottie ran in one store and out the other.
"Is my mother here?"