In this vehicle drawn up at the curb outside the market Lottie would sit reading the _Survey_ (Judge Barton's influence there) while her mother carried on a prolonged and acrimonious transaction with Gus. Thirty-first Street, then Thirty-fifth Street, had become impossible for the family marketing. There groceries and meat markets catered frankly to the Negro trade. Prosperous enough trade it seemed, too, with the windows piled with plump broilers and juicy cuts of ham. The Payson electric waited in Forty-third Street now. Gus's red good-natured face above the enveloping white apron became redder and less good-natured as Mrs. Payson's marketing progressed. New potatoes. A piece of rump for a pot-roast. A head of lettuce. A basket of peaches. Echoes floated out to Lottie waiting at the curb. "Yeh, but looka here, Mis' Payson, I ain't makin' nothin' on that stuff as it is. Two three cents at the most. Say _I_ gotta live too, you know.... Oh, you don't want _that_, Mis' Payson. Tell you the truth, they're pretty soft. Now here's a nice fresh lot come in from Michigan this morning. I picked 'em out myself down on South Water." Mrs. Payson's decided tones: "They'll do for stewing." "All right. 'S for you to say. You got to eat 'em, not me. On'y don't come around to-morrow tellin' me they was no good." Her purchases piled on the leather-upholstered front seat of the electric, Mrs. Payson would be driven home, complaining acidly. This finished Gus for her. Robber! Twenty-seven cents for lamb stew! "But mama, Belle paid thirty-two cents last week. I remember hearing her say that lamb stew was seven or eight cents two or three years ago and now it's thirty-two or thirty----" "Oh, Belle! I'm surprised she ever has lamb stew. Always running short on her allowance with her sirloins and her mushrooms and her broilers. I ran a household for a whole month on what she uses in a week, when I was her age. I don't know how Henry stands it." This ceremony of marketing took half the morning. It should have required little more than an hour. On arriving home Mrs. Payson usually complained of feeling faint. Her purchases piled on the kitchen table, she would go over them with Hulda, the maid-servant. "Put that lettuce in a damp cloth." The maid was doing it. "Rub a little salt and vinegar into that pot roast." The girl had intended to. "You'll have to stew those peaches." That had been apparent after the first disdainful pressing with thumb and forefinger. By this time Hulda's attitude was the bristling one natural to any human being whose intelligence has been insulted by being told to do that which she already had meant to do. Mrs. Payson, still wearing her hat (slightly askew now) would accept the crackers and cheese, or the bit of cold lamb and slice of bread, proffered by Lottie to fend off the "faintness." Often Mrs. Payson augmented this with a rather surprising draught of sherry in a tumbler, from the supply sent by her son-in-law Henry Kemp.