There he was right. It did. Hoops were history. The form-fitting basque, the flattering neck-frill, the hip sash, and the smart (though grotesque) bustle revealed, and even emphasized, lines of the feminine figure--the swell of the bust, the curve of the throat--that the crinoline had for years concealed. This romantic, if somewhat lumpy, costume well became Charlotte's slender figure and stern sad young face. In it Carrie, on the other hand, resembled a shingle in a flower's sheath. This obstacle having been battered down, Charlotte raised another. "They say the Cleaversville road is a sea of mud and no bottom to it in places. The rains." "Then," said Samuel Payson, agreeably, "we shall leave that for another time"--Charlotte brightened--"and go boating in the lagoon instead. Eh, Miss Charlotte?" Charlotte, born fifty years later, would have looked her persistent and unwelcome suitor in the eye and said, "I don't want to go." Charlotte, with the parental eyes upon her, went dutifully upstairs for bonnet and mantle. The lagoon of Samuel Payson's naming was a basin of water between the narrow strip of park on Michigan Avenue and the railway that ran along the lake. It was much used for boating of a polite and restricted nature. It was a warm Sunday evening in the early summer. The better to get the breeze the family was sociably seated out on what was known as the platform. On fine evenings all Chicago sat out on its front steps--"the stoop" it was called. The platform was even more informal than the stoop. It was made of wooden planks built across the ditches that ran along each side of the street. Across it carriages drove up to the sidewalk when visitors contemplated alighting. All down Wabash Avenue you saw families comfortably seated in rockers on these platforms, enjoying the evening breeze and watching the world go by. Here the Thrifts--Isaac, Hetty, and their daughter Carrie--were seated when the triumphant Samuel left with the smoldering Charlotte. Here they were seated when the two returned. The basin reached, they had hired a boat and Samuel had paddled about in a splashy and desultory way, not being in the least an oarsman. He talked, Miss-Charlotteing her so insistently that in ten minutes she felt thumbed all over. She looked out across the lake. He spoke of his loneliness, living at the Tremont House. Before being raised to junior partner he had been a clerk in Isaac Thrift's office. It was thus that Charlotte still regarded him--when she regarded him at all. She looked at him now, bent to the oars, his flat chest concave, his lean arms stringy; panting a little with the unaccustomed exercise. "It must be lonely," murmured Charlotte, absentmindedly if sympathetically. "Your father and mother have been very kind"--he bent a melting look on her--"far kinder than you have been, Miss Charlotte." "It's chilly, now that the sun's gone," said Charlotte. "Shall we row in? This mantle is very light."