Mrs. Carrie Payson said nothing. She did not issue dinner invitations thus, helter-skelter. She did not look displeased, though. "Well, how's business?" Great-aunt Charlotte made a little clucking sound between tongue and palate and prepared to drift from the room. She had a knack of drifting out of the room--evaporating, almost. You looked up, suddenly, and she was not there. Outside there sounded the sharp bleat of a motor horn--a one-lung motor horn. Two short staccato blasts followed by a long one. A signal, certainly. "The poet, Charley," said Henry Kemp; and laughed his big kind laugh. "Ask him in," Mrs. Payson said. "Aren't you going to ask your young man to come in?" Charley was preparing to go. "What for?" she asked now. "To meet the family. Unless you're ashamed of him. When I was a girl----" Great-aunt Charlotte sat back again, waiting. "All right," said Charley. "He'll hate it." She walked across the room smiling; opened the door and called out to the bleat in the blackness: "Come on in!" "What for?" "Meet the family." "Oh, say, listen----" You heard them talking and giggling a little together in the hall. Then they came down the hall and into the living room, these two young things; these two beautiful young things. And suddenly the others in the room felt old--old and fat and futile and done with life. The two stood there in the doorway a moment. The very texture of their skin; the vitality of their vigorous hair as it sprang away in a fine line from their foreheads; the liquid blue-white clearness of the eyeball; the poise of their slim bodies--was youth. She was tall but he was taller. His hair had a warmer glint; it was almost red. In certain lights it was red. The faun type. Ears a little pointed. Contemptuous of systems, you could see that; metric or rhythmic. A good game of tennis, probably. Loathing golf. So graceful as to seem almost slouchy. Lean, composed, self-possessed. White flannel trousers for some athletic reason (indoor tennis, perhaps, at the gym); a loose great-coat buttoned over what seemed to be no shirt at all. Certainly not a costume for a Chicago March night. He wore it with a full dress air. And yet a certain lovable shyness. Charley waved a hand in a gesture that somehow united him with the room--the room full of eyes critical, amused, appraising, speculative, disapproving. "Mother and Dad you know, of course. Grandmother Payson, my Aunt Lottie--Lotta for short. Mr. Ben Gartz.... Oh, forgive me, Aunt Charlotte, I thought you'd gone. There in the corner--my great-aunt Charlotte Thrift.... This is Jesse Dick."