"Tantrim," said Mrs. Deacon, softly.

"Oh, ho," said he, and said no more.

The temper of Mrs. Bett, who also lived with them, had days of high
vibration when she absented herself from the table as a kind of
self-indulgence, and no one could persuade her to food. "Tantrims," they
called these occasions.

"Baked potatoes," said Mr. Deacon. "That's good--that's good. The baked
potato contains more nourishment than potatoes prepared in any other
way. The nourishment is next to the skin. Roasting retains it."

"That's what I always think," said his wife pleasantly.

For fifteen years they had agreed about this.

They ate, in the indecent silence of first savouring food. A delicate
crunching of crust, an odour of baked-potato shells, the slip and touch
of the silver.

"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.