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Lulu sat down in her place. "No," she said. "I'm too tired. I'm sorry, Dwight." "It seems to me " he began. "I don't want any," said Monona. But no one noticed Monona, and Ina did not defer even to Dwight. She, who measured delicate, troy occasions by avoirdupois, said brightly: "Now, Di. You must tell us all about it. Where had you and Aunt Lulu been with mamma's new bag?"
"Well," said Ina, "my part, I think the most awful thing is to have somebody one loves keep secrets from one. No wonder folks get crabbed and spiteful with such treatment." "Mamma!" Monona shouted from her room. "Come and hear me say my prayers!"
"On toast," she added, with a scrupulous regard for the whole truth. Why she should say this so gently no one can tell. She says everything gently. Her "Could you leave me another bottle of milk this morning?" would wring a milkman's heart. "Well, now, let us see," said Mr. Deacon, and attacked the principal dish benignly. "Let us see," he added, as he served. "I don't want any," said Monona.
Ina's plump figure was fitted in the stern, the child Monona affixed, and the boat put off, bow well out of water. On this pleasure ride the face of the wife was as the face of the damned. It was true that she revered her husband's opinions above those of all other men. In politics, in science, in religion, in dentistry she looked up to his dicta as to revelation. And was he not a magistrate?
When Dwight had finished his narration, there was a pause, broken at last by Mrs. Bett: "You tell that better than you used to when you started in telling it," she observed. "You got in some things I guess you used to clean forget about. Monona, get off my rocker." Monona made a little whimpering sound, in pretence to tears.
"Num, num, nummy-num!" sang the child Monona loudly, and was hushed by both parents in simultaneous exclamation which rivalled this lyric outburst. They were alone at table. Di, daughter of a wife early lost to Mr. Deacon, was not there. Di was hardly ever there. She was at that age. That age, in Warbleton. A clock struck the half hour. "It's curious," Mr. Deacon observed, "how that clock loses.
She ate her dinner cold, appeased in vague areas by such martyrdom. They were still at table when the front door opened. "Monona hadn't ought to use the front door so common," Mrs. Bett complained. But it was not Monona. It was Lulu and Cornish. "Well!" said Dwight, tone curving downward. "Well!" said Ina, in replica. "Lulie!" said Mrs.
This point was never to be settled. The colloquy was interrupted by the child Monona, whining for her toast. And the doorbell rang. "Dear me!" said Mr. Deacon. "What can anybody be thinking of to call just at meal-time?" He trod the hall, flung open the street door. Mrs. Deacon listened. Lulu, coming in with the toast, was warned to silence by an uplifted finger.
Had not Lulu taught her to make buttonholes and to hem oh, no I Lulu could not have heard properly. "Everybody's got somebody to be nice to them," she thought now, sitting by the kitchen window, adult yet Cinderella. She thought that some one would come for her. Her mother or even Ina. Perhaps they would send Monona. She waited at first hopefully, then resentfully. The grey rain wrapped the air.
He entered upon a pretty scene. His Ina was darning. Four minutes of grace remaining to the child Monona, she was spinning on one toe with some Bacchanalian idea of making the most of the present. Di dominated, her ruffles, her blue hose, her bracelet, her ring. "Oh, and mamma," she said, "the sweetest party and the dearest supper and the darlingest decorations and the gorgeousest "
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