Lottie Payson was striding home through the early evening mist, the zany March wind buffeting her skirts--no: skirt; it is 1916 and women are knicker-bockered underneath instead of petticoated. She had come from what is known on the South Side as "spending the afternoon." Of late years Lottie had given up this spending of afternoons. Choice and circumstances had combined to bring this about. Her interests had grown away from these women who had been her school-girl friends. The two women with whom she lived made her the staff on which they leaned more and more heavily. Lottie Payson was head of the household in everything but authority. Mrs. Carrie Payson still held the reins. The afternoons had started as a Reading Club when Lottie was about twenty-five and the others a year or two older or younger. Serious reading. Yes, indeed. Effie Case had said, "We ought to improve our minds; not just read anything. I think it would be fine to start with the German poets; Gerty and those." So they had started with Goethe and those but found the going rather rough. This guttural year had been followed by one of French conversation led by a catarrhal person who turned out to be Vermontese instead of Parisian, which accounted for their having learned to pronounce _le_ as "ler." After this they had turned to Modern American Literature; thence, by a process of degeneration, to Current Topics. They had a leader for the Current Topics Class, a retired Madam Chairman. She grafted the front-page headlines onto the _Literary Digest_ and produced a brackish fruit tasting slightly of politics, invention, scandal, dress, labor, society, disease, crime, and royalty. One day, at the last minute, when she had failed to appear for the regular meeting--grip, or a heavy cold--someone suggested, "How about two tables of bridge?" After that the Reading Class alternated between bridge and sewing. The sewing was quite individual and might range all the way from satin camisoles to huckaback towels; from bead bags to bedspreads. The talk, strangely enough, differed little from that of the personally-conducted Current Topics Class days. They all attended lectures pretty regularly; and symphony concerts and civic club meetings.