n and caught her lower lip in her gold-filled teeth.
This was her conjugal rebuking.

Swedenborg always uses "conjugial." And really this sounds more married.
It should be used with reference to the Deacons. No one was ever more
married than they--at least than Mr. Deacon. He made little conjugal
jokes in the presence of Lulu who, now completely unnerved by the habit,
suspected them where they did not exist, feared lurking _entendre_ in
the most innocent comments, and became more tense every hour of her
life.

And now the eye of the master of the house fell for the first time upon
the yellow tulip in the centre of his table.

"Well, _well_!" he said. "What's this?"

Ina Deacon produced, fleetly, an unlooked-for dimple.

"Have you been buying flowers?" the master inquired.

"Ask Lulu," said Mrs. Deacon.

He turned his attention full upon Lulu.

"Suitors?" he inquired, and his lips left their places to form a sort of
ruff about the word.

Lulu flushed, and her eyes and their very brows appealed.

"It was a quarter," she said. "There'll be five flowers."

"You _bought_ it?"

"Yes. There'll be five--that's a nickel apiece."

His tone was as methodical as if he had been talking about the bread.

"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
I