Susan and Mary Lou went into the dining-room, and the closing door shut off the rest of the conversation.  The household was quite used to Georgie’s quarrels with her male friends.

A large, handsome woman, who did not look her sixty years, was moving about the long table, which, spread with a limp and slightly spotted cloth, was partially laid for dinner.  Knives, spoons, forks and rolled napkins were laid in a little heap at each place, the length of the table was broken by salt shakers of pink and blue glass, plates of soda crackers, and saucers of green pickles.

“Hello, Auntie!” Susan said, laying an arm about the portly figure, and giving the lady a kiss.  Mrs. Lancaster’s anxious eye went to her oldest daughter.

“Who’s Georgie talking to?” she asked, in a low tone.

“I don’t know, Ma,” Mary Lou said, sympathetically, pushing a chair against the table with her knee, “Fred Persons, most likely.”

“No.  ’Tisn’t Fred. She just spoke about Fred,” said the mother uneasily.  “This is the man that didn’t meet them Sunday.  Sometimes,” she complained, “it don’t seem like Georgie has any dignity at all!” She had moved to the china closet at one end of the room, and now stood staring at it.  “What did I come here for?” she asked, helplessly.

“Glasses,” prompted Susan, taking some down herself.

“Glasses,” Mrs. Lancaster echoed, in relief.  “Get the butter, Mary Lou?”

“In the kitchen, Ma.”  Miss Lancaster went into the kitchen herself, and Susan went on with the table-setting.  Before she had finished, a boarder or two, against the unwritten law of the house, had come downstairs.  Mrs. Cortelyou, a thin little wisp of a widow, was in the rocker in the bay-window, Major Kinney, fifty, gray, dried-up, was on the horsehair sofa, watching the kitchen door over his paper.  Georgia, having finished her telephoning, had come in to drop idly into her own chair, and play with her knives and forks.  Miss Lydia Lord, a plain, brisk woman, her upper lip darkened with hair, her figure flat and square, like a boy’s, had come down for her sister’s tray, and was talking to Susan in the resolutely cheerful tone that Susan always found annoying, when she was tired.

“The Keiths are off for Europe again, Susan,—­dear me! isn’t it lovely for the people who can do those things!” said Miss Lord, who was governess in a very wealthy household, and liked to talk of the city’s prominent families.  “Some day you and I will have to find a million dollars and run away for a year in Italy!  I wonder, Sue,” the mild banter ceased, “if you could get Mary’s dinner?  I hate to go into the kitchen, they’re all so busy—­”

Susan took the tray, and went through the swinging door, and into the kitchen.  Two or three forms were flitting about in the steam and smoke and flickering gas-light, water was running, gravy hissing on the stove; Alice, the one poor servant the establishment boasted, was attempting to lift a pile of hot plates with an insufficient cloth.  Susan filled her tray silently.