Mrs. Carrie Payson's funeral proved an enlightening thing. There came to it a queer hodge-podge of people; representatives of Chicago's South Side old families who had not set foot in the Prairie Avenue house in half a century; real estate men who had known her in the days of her early business career; Brosch, the carpenter and contractor, with whom she had bickered and bartered for years; some of the Polish and Italian tenants from over Eighteenth Street way; women in shawls of whom Lottie had never heard, and who owed Mrs. Payson some unnamed debt of gratitude. Lottie wondered if she had ever really understood her mother; if the indomitability that amounted almost to ruthlessness had not been, after all, a finer quality than a certain fluid element in herself, in Aunt Charlotte, in Charley, which had handicapped them all. Aunt Charlotte mourned her sister sincerely; seemed even to miss her tart-tongued goading. No one to find fault with her clothes, her habits, her ideas, her conversation. Lottie humoured her outrageously. The household found itself buying as Mrs. Payson had bought; thinking as she had thought; regulating its hours as they had been regulated for her needs. Her personality was too powerful to fade so soon after the corporeal being had gone. More easily than any of them Aunt Charlotte had accepted the advent of the French baby. To her the sound and sight of a baby in the old Prairie Avenue house seemed an accustomed and natural thing. She had a way of mixing names, bewilderingly. Often as not she called Claire "Lottie," or Charley "Claire." She clapped her hands at the baby and wagged her head at her tremulously, and said, "No, no, no! Auntie punish!" and "Come to Auntie Charlotte," exactly as she had done forty years before to Belle. Once she put the child down on the floor for a moment and Claire began to wriggle her way down the faded green stream of the parlor carpet river, and to poke a finger into the sails of the dim old ships and floral garlands, just as Lottie and Belle had done long ago. There was much talk of selling the old house; but it never seemed to amount to more than talk. In proper time Claire was cutting her teeth and soothing her hot swollen gums on the hard surface of Ole Bull's arms, just as Belle and Lottie had done before her. This only, of course, when Aunt Charlotte was holding her. Lottie and Charley both put down the practice as highly unhygienic. "Fiddlesticks! You and Belle did it with all your teeth. And you're living."