"Better put in three potatoes; Joe can always eat two."
Charlotte was in the studio, firm as lichen on a rock, with most of Kate's studies piled up behind a green denim curtain—"You're sure you don't mind, Aunt Kate?"—and their places taken by passe-partouted Gibson pictures: "Is a Caddy Always Necessary?" "The Eternal Question," and the rest, class photographs, and the big Princeton pennant Hoagland Driggs had given her. Lulu had died nine years ago, leaving her few thousand dollars to Charlotte, and Charlotte to Kate.
Well, Charlotte had turned into a splendid woman with no nonsense about her, Kate thought, walking along through fine spring rain that made her cheeks glow, made the pear blossoms shine. There never had been any nonsense about her, thought Kate, remembering the Charlotte who practiced conscientiously to the wagging metronome, the Charlotte whose reports were always marked Excellent, the Charlotte she couldn't make fluffy and vivacious, like the rest of the girls. She thought of the way the others had gone on when they were sixteen or seventeen, Dotty and Gladys and Mary Katherine and Marjorie, with their pompadours and their flowered dimities and their shirred satin girdles: "Oh, my dear—oh, how ghastly, I called this man my dear! I simply shriek my head off at a football game, I get so excited, my dear; I haven't any voice left; I'm simply crazy; I just grab
