In August Lottie accompanied her mother and Aunt Charlotte up to one of the Michigan lake resorts. They went there every summer. The food was good, the air superb, the people typical of any Michigan first-class resort. Jeannette had gone to spend ten days in a girls' camp in Wisconsin. She had a job promised for September. The Paysons had a three-room cottage near the hotel and under the hotel's management; took their meals in the hotel dining room. The cottage boasted a vine-covered porch and a tiny garden. The days were not half bad. Mrs. Payson played bridge occasionally. Aunt Charlotte rocked and knitted and watched the young girls in their gay sweaters and flat-heeled white shoes and smart loud skirts. Lottie even played golf occasionally, when her mother and Aunt Charlotte were napping or resting, or safely disposed of on their own cottage porch or hotel veranda. There were few men during the week. On Fridays husbands and fiancés swarmed down on train and boat for the week-end. On Saturday night there was a dance. Lottie, sitting on the porch of their little cottage, could hear the music. Her mother and Aunt Charlotte were always in bed by ten-thirty, at the latest. Often it was an hour earlier than that. The evenings were terrible beyond words. Long, black, velvety nights during which she sat alone on the little porch guarding the two sleeping occupants of the cottage; staring out into the darkness. The crickets cheeped and chirped. A young girl's laugh rang out from the hotel veranda beyond. A man's voice sounded, low, resonant, as two quiet figures wound their way along one of the little paths that led down to the water. A blundering moth bumped its head against the screen door. A little group of hotel kitchen-girls and dish-washers skirted the back of the cottage on their way to their quarters, talking gutturally. The evenings were terrible beyond words. CHAPTER XIII