"Yet we give you a home on the supposition that you have no money to spend, even for the necessities."
His voice, without resonance, cleft air, thought, spirit, and even flesh.
Mrs. Deacon, indeterminately feeling her guilt in having let loose the dogs of her husband upon Lulu, interposed: "Well, but, Herbert—Lulu isn't strong enough to work. What's the use...."
She dwindled. For years the fiction had been sustained that Lulu, the family beast of burden, was not strong enough to work anywhere else.
"The justice business—" said Dwight Herbert Deacon—he was a justice of the peace—"and the dental profession—" he was also a dentist—"do not warrant the purchase of spring flowers in my home."
"Well, but, Herbert—" It was his wife again.
"No more," he cried briefly, with a slight bend of his head. "Lulu meant no harm," he added, and smiled at Lulu.
There was a moment's silence into which Monona injected a loud "Num, num, num-my-num," as if she were the burden of an Elizabethan lyric. She seemed to close the incident. But the burden was cut off untimely. There was, her father reminded her portentously, company in the parlour.
"When the bell rang, I was so afraid something had happened to Di," said Ina sighing.
"Let's see," said Di's father. "Where is little daughter to-night?"