“Yes, let us put you on the car,” Susan suggested.

“I declare I hate to have you,” the older woman hesitated.

“Well, I’ll change,” Mary Lou sighed wearily.  “I’ll get right into my things, a breath of air will do us both good, won’t it, Sue?”

Presently they all walked to the McAllister Street car.  Susan, always glad to be out at night, found something at which to stop in every shop window; she fairly danced along at her cousin’s side, on the way back.

“I think Fillmore Street’s as gay as Kearney, don’t you, Mary Lou?  Don’t you just hate to go in.  Don’t you wish something exciting would happen?”

“What a girl you are for wanting excitement, Sue.  I want to get back and see that Georgie hasn’t shut everyone out of the parlor!” worried Mary Lou.

They went through the basement door to the dining room, where one or two old ladies were playing solitaire, on the red table-cloth, under the gas-light.  Susan drew up a chair, and plunged into a new library book.  Mary Lou, returning from a trip upstairs, said noiselessly, “Gone walking!” and Susan looked properly disgusted at Georgie’s lack of propriety.  Mary Lou began a listless game of patience, with a shabby deck of cards taken from the sideboard drawer, presently she grew interested, and Susan put aside her book, and began to watch the cards, too.  The old ladies chatted at intervals over their cards.  One game followed another, Mary Lou prefacing each with a firm, “Now, no more after this one, Sue,” and a mention of the time.

It was like many of their evenings, like three hundred evenings a year.  The room grew warm, the gas-lights crept higher and higher, flared noisily, and were lowered.  Mary Lou unfastened her collar, Susan rumpled her hair.  The conversation, always returning to the red king and the black four-spot, ranged idly here and there.  Susan observed that she must write some letters, and meant to take a hot bath and go early to bed.  But she sat on and on; the cards, by the smallest percentage of amusement, still held them.

At ten o’clock Mrs. Lancaster and Virginia came in, bright-eyed and chilly, eager to talk of the lecture.  Mrs. Lancaster loosened her coat, laid aside the miserable little strip of fur she always wore about her throat, and hung her bonnet, with its dangling widow’s veil, over the back of her deep chair.  She drew Susan down to sit on her knee.  “All the baby auntie’s got,” she said.  Georgie presently came downstairs, her caller, “that fresh kid I met at Sallie’s,” had gone, and she was good-natured again.  Mary Lou produced the forgotten bag of candy; they all munched it and talked.  The old ladies had gone upstairs long ago.

All conversations led Mrs. Lancaster into the past, the girls could almost have reconstructed those long-ago, prosperous years, from hearing her tell of them.

“—­Papa fairly glared at the man,” she was saying presently, won to an old memory by the chance meeting of an old friend to-night, “I can see his face this day!  I said, ’Why, papa, I’d just as soon have these rooms!’ But, no.  Papa had paid for the best, and he was going to have the best—­”