"Oh, you're disgusting, that's what you are, Lotta Payson! You practically never do anything you really want to do. You're so nobly self-sacrificing that it's sickening. It's a weakness. It's a vice." "Yes ma'am," said Lotta gravely. "And if you kids don't do, say, and feel everything that comes into your heads you go around screaming about inhibitions. If you new-generation youngsters don't yield to every impulse you think you're being stunted." "Well, I'd rather try things and find they're bad for me than never try them at all. Look at Aunt Charlotte!" Lottie at the mirror was dabbing at her nose with a hasty powder-pad. She regarded Charley now, through the glass. "Aunt Charlotte's more--more understanding than mother is." "Yes, but it's been pretty expensive knowledge for her, I'll just bet. Some day I'm going to ask her why she never married. Great-grandmother Thrift had a hand in it; you can tell that by looking at that picture of her in the hoops trimmed with bands of steel, or something. Gosh!" "You wouldn't ask her, Charley!" "I would too. She's probably dying to tell. Anybody likes to talk of their love affairs. I'm going to cultivate Aunt Charlotte, I am. Research work." "Yes," retorted Lottie, brushing a bit of powder from the front of the blue silk, "do. And lend her your Havelock Ellis and Freud first, so that she'll at least have a chance to be shocked, poor dear. Otherwise she won't know what you're driving at." "You're a worm," said Charley. She jumped off the footboard, took her aunt in her strong young arms and hugged her close. An unusual demonstration for Charley, a young woman who belonged to the modern school that despises sentiment and frowns upon weakly emotional display; to whom rebellion is a normal state; clear-eyed, remorseless, honest, fearless, terrifying; the first woman since Eve to tell the truth and face the consequences. Lottie, looking at her, often felt puerile and ineffectual. "You don't have half enough fun. And no self-expression. Come on and join a gymnastic dancing class. You'd make a dancer. Your legs are so nice and muscular. You'd love it. Wonderful exercise." She sprang away suddenly and stood poised for a brief moment in what is known as First Position in dancing. "Tour jeté--" she took two quick sliding steps, turned and leaped high and beautifully--"tour jeté--" and again, bringing up short of the wall, her breathing as regular as though she had not moved. "Try it."