Lottie would look ruefully down her own length, a mischievous smile crinkling the corners of her eyes. "And I thought I looked so nice! Not chic, perhaps, but nice!" Her slim, well-shod feet, her neat silken ankles, her sensible skirt, her collars and cuffs, or blouses and frills were always so admirably trim, so crisply fresh where freshness was required. Looking at her you had such confidence in the contents of her bureau drawers. "Oh--nice! Who wants to look nice, nowadays!" Mrs. Payson always insisted on talking business with her courteous but palpably irked son-in-law. Her views and methods were not his. When, in self-defense, he hinted this to her she resented it spiritedly with, "Well, I ran a successful business and supported a household before you had turned your first dollar, Henry Kemp. I'm not a fool." "I should think not, Mother Payson. But things have changed since your time. Methods." He knew his wife was tapping a meaningful foot; and that Charley's mischievous intelligent eyes held for him a message of quick understanding and sympathy. Great friends, he and Charley, though in rare moments of anger he had been known to speak of her to his wife as "your daughter." Mrs. Payson was always ready with a suggestion whereby Henry Kemp could improve his business. Henry Kemp's business was that of importing china, glassware, and toys. Before the war he had been on the road to a more than substantial fortune. France, Italy, Bohemia, and Bavaria meant, to Henry Kemp, china from Limoges; glassware from Venice and Prague; toys from Nürnberg and Munich. But Zeppelin bombs, long-distance guns, and U-boats had shivered glass, china, and toys into fragments these two years past. The firm had turned to America for these products and found it sadly lacking. American dolls were wooden-faced; American china was heavy, blue-white; American glass-blowing was a trade, not an art. Henry Kemp hardly dared think of what another year of war would mean to him. Lottie thought of these things as the Indiana Avenue car droned along. Her nerves were pushing it vainly. She'd be terribly late. And she had told Hulda that she'd be home in time to beat up the Roquefort dressing that Henry liked. Oh, well, dinner would be delayed a few minutes. Anyway, it was much better than dinner alone with mother and Aunt Charlotte. Dinner alone with mother and Aunt Charlotte had grown to be something of a horror. Lottie dreaded and feared the silence that settled down upon them. Sometimes she would realize that the three of them had sat almost through the meal without speaking. Lottie struggled to keep up the table-talk. There was something sodden and deadly about these conversationless dinners. Lottie would try to chat brightly about the day's happenings. But when these happenings had just been participated in by all three, as was usually the case, the brightness of their recounting was likely to be considerably tarnished.