And so they were married. After it was over Lottie went back to the Red Cross shop. Three days later she had a letter from Beck. It was not one of the remote and carefully impersonal letters of the modern bride. It was packed with all the old-fashioned terms in which honeymoon brides of a less sophisticated day used to voice their ecstasy. "... Most wonderful man ... happiest girl in the world ... I thought I knew him but I never dreamed he was so ... makes me feel so humble ... wonder what I have ever done to deserve such a prince among...." Lottie told her mother and Aunt Charlotte about it that evening at dinner. It was very hot. Lottie had been ashamed of her own waspishness and irritability before dinner. She attributed it to the weather. Sometimes, nowadays, she wondered at her own manner. Was she growing persnickety, she asked herself, and fault-finding and crabbed? It seemed to her that the two old women were calmer, more tolerant, less fault-finding than she. She was the crotchety one. It annoyed Lottie to see Aunt Charlotte munching chocolates just before dinner. "Oh, Aunt Charlotte, for heaven's sake! Can't you wait until after dinner? You won't eat a thing." "It doesn't matter if I don't, Lottie," Aunt Charlotte returned, mildly. Aunt Charlotte, at seventy-five, and rapidly approaching seventy-six, was now magnificently free. She defied life. What could it do to her! Nothing that it had not already done. So she ate, slept, talked as she pleased. A second youth seemed to have come upon her. To-night, after Lottie's story of Beck Schaefer's marriage Mrs. Carrie Payson had said, with apparent irrelevance, "I won't be here always, Lottie. Neither will Aunt Charlotte." A little pause, then, "I wish you were settled, too." Lottie deliberately pretended to misunderstand. "Settled, mama! My goodness I should think I'm settled enough!" She glanced about the quiet old room. But she knew what her mother meant, and resented it. Settled. Shelved. Her mother was thinking of Ben Gartz, Lottie knew.