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