Charley ate two bites of the big succulent crustacean and left the rest disdainfully as a reproach and a punishment for him. She talked little, and then of Lottie. Her manner was frigid, remote, baffling. A baby vamp--she, Charley Kemp! who loathed cheapness, and bobbed hair, and wriggling ways, and the whole new breed of her contemporaries who were of the hard-drinking, stairway kissing, country-club petting class. She thought of Jesse, looked out across the broad avenue to the great blue expanse of lake as though it were in reality the ocean that lay between them; and left her sweet untouched on her plate. Mrs. Kemp did not speak to Charley of Ben Gartz's insistent attentions. Probably she did not even admit to herself the meaning of them, at first. But there is no doubt that she began, perhaps unconsciously, a process of slow poisoning. "They all say this will go on for years. There won't be a young man left in the world--nor a middle-aged man, for that matter. Nothing but old men and children. Look at France, and Poland, and Germany! I don't know what the women are going to do." "Do?" queried Charley, maliciously; she knew perfectly well what her mother meant. "Do for husbands. Girls must marry, you know." "I don't see the necessity," said Charley, coolly. (Charley, who stretched out her arms in the dark.) "Well I do. How would you like to be another Aunt Charlotte? Or a Lottie, for that matter?" "There are worse fates, mother dear. For that matter, I know a lot of married women who envy me my independence. I don't know any married women I envy." "That's complimentary to your father, I must say." "Now, don't be personal, mother. I'd rather have Dad for a father than any father I've ever seen. Why, he's darling. I love the way he doesn't get me; and his laugh; and his sweetness with you; and his fineness and dignity; and the way he's kept his waistline; and his fondness for the country. Oh, everything about him as a father. But as the type of husband for me Dad lacks the light touch.... What a conversation! I'm surprised at you, Belle Kemp!"