Silence again. An occasional motor sped past them in the darkness. To the south the great pier, like a monster sea-serpent, stretched its mile-length into the lake. A freighter, ore-laden, plying its course between some northern Michigan mine and an Indiana steel mill was transformed by the darkness and distance into a barge of beauty--mystic, silent, glittering. "What are you going to do with your week, Lotta?" "H'm? Oh! Well, there's the housecleaning----" "Oh!" Charley slammed her fist down on the motor horn. It squawked in chorus with her protest. "If what the Bible promises is true then you're the heiress of the ages, you are." "Heiress?" "'The meek shall inherit the earth.'" "I'm not meek. I'm just the kind of person that things don't happen to." "You don't let them happen. When everything has gone wrong, and you're feeling stifled and choked, and you've just been forbidden, as if you were a half-wit of sixteen, to do something that you've every right to do, what's your method! Instead of blowing up with a loud report--instead of asserting yourself like a free-born white woman--you put on your hat and take a long walk and work it off that way. Then you come home with that high spiritual look on your face that makes me want to scream and slap you. You're exactly like Aunt Charlotte. When she and Grandma have had a tiff she sails upstairs and starts to clean out her bureau drawers and wind old ribbons, and fold things. Well, some day in a crisis she'll find that her bureau drawers have all been tidied the day before. _Then_ what'll she do!" "Muss 'em up." "So will you--muss things up. You mark the words of a gal that's been around." "You kids to-day are so sure of yourselves. I wonder if your method is going to work out any better than ours. You haven't proved it yet. You know, always, exactly what you want to do and then you go ahead and do it. It's so simple that there must be a catch in it somewhere." "It's full of catches. That's what makes it so fascinating. All these centuries we've been told to profit by the advice of our elders. What's living for if not to experience? How can anyone know whether you're right or wrong? Oh, I don't mean about small things. Any stranger can decide for you that blue is more becoming than black. But the big things--those things I want to decide for myself. I'm entitled to my own mistakes. I've the right to be wrong. How many middle-aged people do you know whose lives aren't a mess this minute! The thing is to be able to say, 'I planned this myself and my plans didn't work. Now I'll take my medicine.' You can't live somebody else's life without your own getting all distorted in the effort. Now I'll probably marry Jesse Dick----" "Charley Kemp! You don't know what you're saying. You're a nineteen-year-old infant."