Belle's front room was a carefully careless place--livable, inviting--with its books, and lamps, and plump low chairs mothering unexpected tables nestled at their elbows--tantalising little tables holding the last new novel, face downward; a smart little tooled leather box primly packed with cigarettes; a squat wooden bowl, very small, whose tipped cover revealed a glimpse of vivid scrunchy fruit-drops within. Splashes of scarlet and orange bitter-sweet in lustre bowls, loot of Charley's autumn days at the dunes. A roll of watermelon-pink wool and a ball of the same shade in one corner of the deep davenport, with two long amber needles stuck through prophesied the first rainbow note of Charley's summer wardrobe. The grand piano holding a book of Chopin and a chromo-covered song-hit labeled, incredibly enough, Tya-da-dee. It was as unlike the Prairie Avenue living room as Charley was unlike Mrs. Carrie Payson. Belle had recently had the sun-parlour done in the new Chinese furniture--green enameled wood with engaging little Chinese figures and scenes painted on it; queer gashes of black here and there and lamp shades shaped like some sort of Chinese head-gear; no one knew quite what. Surely no Mongolian--coolie or mandarin--would have recognised the origin of anything in the Chinese sun-parlour. Gussie answered the door. An admirable young woman, Gussie, capable, self-contained, self-respecting. Sprung from a loose-moraled slovenly household, she had, somehow, got the habit of personal cleanliness and of straight thinking. Gussie's pastry hand was a light, deft, clean one. Gussie's bedroom had none of the kennel stuffiness of the average kitchen-bedroom. Gussie's pride in her own bathroom spoke in shining tiles and gleaming porcelain. "Oo, Miss Lottie! How you are early! Mrs. ain't up at all yet. Miss Charley she is in bathtub." "That's all right, Gussie. I came to see you." Gussie's eyes were red-rimmed. "Yeh ... Jennie...." She led the way back to the kitchen; a sturdy young woman facing facts squarely. Her thick-tongued speech told of her Slavic origin. She went on with her morning's work as she talked and Lottie listened. Hers was a no-good family. Her step-father she dismissed briefly as a bum. Her mother was always getting mixed up with the boarders--that menace of city tenement life. And now Jennie. Jennie wasn't bad. Only she liked a good time. The two brothers (rough, lowering fellows) were always a-jumping on Jennie. It was fierce. They wouldn't let her go out with the fellas. In the street they yelled at her and shamed Jennie for Jennie's crowd right out. They wanted she should marry one of the boarders. Well, say, he had money sure, but old like Jennie's own father. Jennie was only seventeen. All this while Gussie was slamming expertly from table to sink, from sink to stove. "Seventeen! Why doesn't she leave home and work out as you do, Gussie? Housework."