"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. Ina said
"Darling--quiet!"--chin a little lifted, lower lip revealing lower
teeth for the word's completion; and she held it.

The Plows were asking something about Mexico. Dwight was wondering if it
would let up raining _at all_. Di and Jenny came whispering into the
room. But all these distractions Ninian Deacon swept aside.

"Miss Lulu," he said, "I wanted you to hear about my trip up the Amazon,
because I knew how interested you are in travels."

He talked, according to his lights, about the Amazon. But the person who
most enjoyed the recital could not afterward have told two words that
he said. Lulu kept the position which she had taken at first, and she
dare not change. She saw the blood in the veins of her hands and wanted
to hide them. She wondered if she might fold her arms, or have one hand
to support her chin, gave it all up and sat motionless, save for the
rocking.

Then she forgot everything. For the first time in years some one was
talking and looking not only at Ina and Dwight and their guests, but at
her.

III

JUNE

On a June morning Dwight Herbert Deacon looked at the sky, and said with
his manner of originating it: "How about a picnic this afternoon?"

Ina, with her blank, upward look, exclaimed: "To-_day?_"

"First class day, it looks like to me."

Come to think of it, Ina didn't know that there was anything to prevent,
but mercy, Herbert was so sudden. Lulu began to recite the resources of
the house for a lunch. Meanwhile, since the first mention of picnic, the
child Monona had been dancing stiffly about the room, knees stiff,
elbows stiff, shoulders immovable, her straight hair flapping about her
face. The sad dance of the child who cannot dance because she never has
danced. Di gave a conservative assent--she was at that age--and then
took advantage of the family softness incident to a guest and demanded
that Bobby go too. Ina hesitated, partly because she always hesitated,
partly because she was tribal in the extreme. "Just our little family
and Uncle Ninian would have been so nice," she sighed, with her consent.

When, at six o'clock, Ina and Dwight and Ninian assembled on the porch
and Lulu came out with the basket, it was seen that she was in a
blue-cotton house-gown.

"Look here," said Ninian, "aren't you going?"

"M