This morning Lottie was up, dressed, and telephoning the Élite Garage before eight o'clock. She wanted to make an early start. She meant to use the electric in order to save time. Without it the trip between the Payson's house on Prairie Avenue and the Kemp's on Hyde Park Boulevard near the lake was a pilgrimage marked by dreary waits on clamorous corners for dirty yellow cars that never came. Early as she was Lottie had heard Aunt Charlotte astir much earlier. She had not yet come down, however. Mrs. Payson had already breakfasted and read the paper. After Mrs. Payson had finished with a newspaper its page-sequence was irrevocably ruined for the next reader. Its sport sheet mingled with the want ads; its front page lay crumpled upon Music and the Drama. Lottie sometimes wondered if her own fondness for a neatly folded uncrumpled morning paper was only another indication of chronic spinsterhood. Aunt Charlotte had once said, as she smoothed the wrinkled sheets with her wavering withered fingers, "Reading a newspaper after you've finished with it, Carrie, is like getting the news three days stale. No flavour to it." Lottie scarcely glanced at the headlines as she drank her coffee this morning. Her mother was doing something or other at the sideboard. Mrs. Payson was the sort of person who does slammy flappy things in a room where you happened to be breakfasting, or writing, or reading; things at which you could not express annoyance and yet which annoyed you to the point of frenzy. She lifted dishes and put them down. She rattled silver in the drawer. She tugged at a sideboard door that always stuck. She made notes on a piece of wrapping paper with a hard pencil and tapping sounds. All interspersed with a spasmodic conversation carried on in a high voice with Hulda in the kitchen, the swinging door of the pantry between them. "Need any rice?" "W'at?" "Rice!" "We got yet." More tapping of the pencil accompanied by a sotto voce murmur--"Soap ... kitchen cleanser ... new potatoes ... see about electric light bulbs ... coffee----" she raised her voice again: "We've got plenty of coffee I know." Silence from the kitchen. "Hulda, we've got plenty of coffee! I got a pound on Wednesday." Silence. Then--"He don't last over Sunday." "Not--why my dear young woman----" the swinging door whiffed and whoofed with the energy of her exit as she passed into the kitchen to do battle with the coffee-toper. Lottie was quite unconscious of the frown that her rasped nerves had etched between her eyes. She was so accustomed to these breakfast irritations that she did not know they irritated her. She was even smiling a little, grimly amused.