Her mother, Mary Elizabeth (Riley) Payne, 1864-1936, was a sister of the Hoosier Poet, who in 1876 presented to her a set of humorous sketches in ink with verses appended to the drawings. Her father, Frank Charles Payne, 1862-1947, a newspaperman, kept a diary while attending DePauw University between 1883-1886 in which he noted briefly that Riley had presented a lecture.

Schooled as a violinist, Miss Payne with her mother went to Europe in 1908 to study and remained until the outbreak of the European war. Some of her experience are recounted in an unpublished undated narrative entitled "Brittany Profile." Three of her European acquaintances, Vittorio Assale, Georges Dubois, and Augustin Wattebled, wrote to her in French and Italian of their activities as soldiers during the war, 1914-1918.

Interest in psychical research is brought out in Lesley Payne's letters from Hereward Carrington and Leonora (Simonds) Piper. A letter of Edmund Eitel to his Auntie Mame (Mary Elizabeth Riley Payne) on February 19, 1908, noted an attempt at thought transference.

Throughout the correspondence is a pervasive attention to the welfare of James Whitcomb Riley. Miss Payne while attending her uncle on a visit to Florida in March and April of 1915 sent chatty letters to her mother of her uncle's habits and the local social scene. Following Riley's death in 1916 she and her mothers were heirs with the Eitel cousins to the Riley estate. Both later wrote their reminiscences of the poet.