"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."