Ben Gartz came into the living room, rubbing his hands and smiling genially. A genial man, Ben, and yet you did not warm yourself at his geniality. A little too anxious, he was. Not quite spruce. Looking his forty-nine years. A pale and mackerel eye in a rubicund countenance, had Ben Gartz. Combed his thinning hair in careful wisps across the top of his head to hide the spreading bald spot. The kind of man who says, "H'are you, sir!" on meeting you, and offers you a cigar at once; who sits in the smokers of Pullmans; who speaks of children always as "Kiddies." He toed in a little as he walked. A plumpish man and yet with an oddly shrunken look about him somehow. The flame had pretty well died out in him. He and his kind fought a little shy of what they called "the old girls." But he was undoubtedly attracted to Lottie. Ben Gartz had been a good son to his mother. She had regarded every unmarried woman as her possible rival. She always had said, "Ben ought to get married, I'd like to see him settled." But it was her one horror. The South Side, after her death, said as one voice, "Well, Ben, you certainly have nothing to reproach yourself with. You were a wonderful son to her." And the South Side was right. Once Mrs. Payson said of him, "He's a good boy." Aunt Charlotte had cocked an eye. "He's uninteresting enough to be good. But I don't know. He looks to me as if he was just waiting for a chance to be bad." She had caught in Ben Gartz's face a certain wistfulness--a something unfulfilled--that her worldly-wise sister had mistaken for mildness. Henry Kemp brightened at the visitor's entrance as well he might in this roomful of women. "Well, Ben, glad to see you. Come into the harem." Ben shook hands with Mrs. Payson, with Aunt Charlotte, with Belle, with Charley. "My, my, look at this kiddy! Why, she's a young lady! Better look out, Miss Lottie; you'll be letting your little niece get ahead of you." Shook hands with Henry Kemp. Out came the cigar. "No, no!" protested Henry. "You've got to smoke one of mine." They exchanged cigars, eyed them, tucked them in vest pockets and lighted one of their own, according to the solemn and ridiculous ritual of men. Ben Gartz settled back in a chair and crossed his chubby knees. "This is mighty nice, let me tell you, for an old batch living in a hotel room. The family circle, like this. Mighty nice." He glanced at Lottie. He admired Lottie with an admiration that had in it something of fear, so he always assumed a boisterous bluffness with her. Sometimes he felt, vaguely, that she was laughing at him. But she wasn't. She was sorry for him. He was to her as obvious as a child to its mother. "You might have come for dinner," Lottie said, kindly, "if I'd known, earlier. The folks had dinner here." "Oh, no!" protested Ben as though the invitation were now being tendered. "I couldn't think of troubling you. Mighty nice of you, though, to think of me. Maybe some other time----"