BONDS MORTGAGES _Successor to late Isaac Thrift_ Later she changed this to "Carrie Thrift Payson." Change came easily to Carrie. Adaptability was one of her gifts. In 1893 (World's Fair year) she was one of the first to wear the new Eton jacket and separate skirt of blue serge (it became almost a uniform with women); and the shirtwaist, a garment that marked an innovation in women's clothes. She worked like a man, ruled the roost, was as ruthless as a man. She was neither a good housekeeper nor marketer, but something perverse in her made her insist on keeping a hand on the reins of household as well as business. It was, perhaps, due to a colossal egotism and a petty love of power. Charlotte could have marketed expertly and thriftily but Carrie liked to do it on her way downtown in the morning, stopping at grocer's and butcher's on Thirty-first Street and prefacing her order always with, "I'm in a hurry." The meat, vegetables, and fruit she selected were never strictly first-grade. A bargain delighted her. If an orange was a little soft in one spot she reckoned that the spot could be cut away. Such was her system of false economy. With the World's Fair came a boom in real estate and Carrie Payson rode on the crest of it. There still were heart-breaking debts to pay and she paid them honestly. She was too much a Thrift to do otherwise. She never became rich, but she did manage a decent livelihood. Fortunately for all of them, old Isaac Thrift had bought some low swampy land far out in what was considered the wilderness, near the lake, even beyond the section known as Cottage Grove. With the Fair this land became suddenly valuable. There's no denying that Carrie lacked a certain feminine quality. If one of the children chanced to fall ill, their mother, bustling home from the office, had no knack of smoothing a pillow or cooling a hot little body or easing a pain. "Please, mother, would you mind not doing that? It makes my headache worse." Her fingers were heavy, clumsy, almost rough, like a man's. Her maternal guidance of her two daughters took the form of absent-minded and rather nagging admonitions: "Belle, you're reading against the light." "Lottie, did you change your dress when you came home from school?" "Don't bite that thread with your teeth!" Or, as it became later, merely, "Your teeth!"