Lottie found herself possessed of occasional leisure. She could spend a half-day in the country. She could lunch in the park and stroll over to the Wooded Island to watch and wonder at the budding marvel of trees and shrubs and bushes. She even thought, boldly, of getting a Saturday job of some sort--perhaps in connection with Judge Barton's court, but hesitated to appropriate Jeannette's time permanently thus. The atmosphere of the old Prairie Avenue home was less turbid, somehow. Jeannette was a dash of clear cold water in the muddy sediment of their existence. Sometimes the thought came to Lottie that she hadn't been needed in the household after all. That is, she--Lottie Payson--to the exclusion of anyone else. Anyone else would have done as well. She had merely been the person at hand. Looking back on the past ten years she hated to believe this. If she had merely been made use of thus, then those ten years had been wasted, thrown away, useless--she put the thought out of her mind as morbid. Sometimes, too, of late, Lottie took a hasty fearful glance into the future and there saw herself a septuagenarian like Aunt Charlotte; living out her life with Belle. "No! No! No!" protested a voice within her rising to a silent shriek. "No!" Lottie was thirty-three the last week in April. "Now Lottie!" her mother's friends said to her, wagging a chiding forefinger, "you're not going to let your little niece get ahead of you, are you!" She rarely saw the Girls now. She heard that Beck Schaefer had taken to afternoon tea dancing. She was seen daily at hotel tea rooms in company with pallid and incredibly slim youths of the lizard type, their hair as glittering as their boots; lynx-eyed; exhaling a last hasty puff of cigarette smoke as they rose from the table for the next dance; inhaling a grateful lungful before they so much as sat down again after that dance was finished. They wore very tight pants and slim-waisted coats, and their hats came down over their ears as if they were too big for their heads. Beck, smelling expensively of L'Origan and wearing very palpable slippers and stockings was said to pay the checks proffered by the waiter at the close of these afternoons. Lottie's informant further confided to her that Beck was known in tea-dance circles as The Youth's Companion.