"Well, ducky, I can't ask Alan and Janet without their father, now can I? I mean, you know what he is, and this being a dinner-party, and him a sort of connection of Wally's. It isn't like asking the young people over to tennis, when he wouldn't expect to be invited."
"That's right!" said Wally. "Crab poor old Harold! I thought it wouldn't be long before you started on him. I'd like to know what harm he's ever done you."
"I don't like him," said Ermyntrude. "Some people might say he's done me plenty of harm leading you into ways we won't discuss at the breakfast-table, let alone planting himself down in the Dower House."
"You never made any bones about letting it to him, did you?"
"No, I didn't, not with you asking me to let him rent the place, and saying he was a relation of yours. But if I'd known what sort of an influence he was going to be on you, and no more related to you than the man in the moon."
"Well, that's where you're wrong, because he is related to me," interrupted Wally. "I forget just how it goes, but I know we've got the same great-great-grandfather. Or am I wrong? There may have been three greats, not that it matters."
"Ancestors," said Vicky.
Ermyntrude refused to follow a false trail she quite clearly perceived. "It's no relationship at all to my way of thinking, and you know very well that isn't what I've got against Harold White, however hard you may try to turn the subject."
"The Bawtrys are stuffy," said Vicky suddenly.
"Well, they are a bit," confessed her mother. "But it's something to get the best people to come just for a friendly dinner-party, and I don't mind telling you, lovey, that they never have before."