l background. She began to let
Mother do the sock-darning--huge uninteresting piles of Harris Hartwig's
faded mustard-colored cotton socks, and she snapped at Father when he
was restlessly prowling about the house, "My head aches so, I'm sure
it's going to be a sick headache, and I do think you might let me have a
nap instead of tramping and tramping till my nerves get so frazzled that
I could just shriek."

With this slight damming of her flowing fount of filial love, Lulu
combined a desire to have them appear as features at a musicale she was
to give, come Saturday evening. Mother was to be in a "dear ducky lace
cap" and Father in a frilled shirt and a long-tailed coat which Harris
Hartwig had once worn in theatricals, the two of them presiding at the
refreshments table.

"Like a prize Persian cat and a pet monkey," Father said.

Against this indignity they frettingly rebelled. Father snarled, "Good
Lord! I'm not much older than your precious dumpling of a Harris." It
was the snarl of a caged animal. Lulu had them; she merely felt
misunderstood when they protested.

Friday morning. The musicale was coming next day, and Lulu had already
rehearsed them in their position as refreshment ornaments. Father had
boldly refused to wear the nice, good frilled shirt and "movie-actor
coat" during the rehearsal.

"Very well," said Lulu, "but you will to-morrow evening."

Father wasn't sure whether Lulu would use an ax or chloroform or tears
on him, but he was gloomily certain that she would have him in the
shameless garments on Saturday evening.

There was a letter for him on the ten o'clock morning mail. He didn't
receive many letters--one a month from Joe Tubbs relating diverting
scandal about perfectly respectable neighbors, or an occasional note
from Cousin George Henry of Stamford. Lulu was acutely curious regarding
it; she almost smelled it, with that quivering sharp-pointed nose of
hers that could tell for hours afterward whether Father had been smoking
"those nasty, undignified little cigarettes--why don't you smoke the
handsome brier pipe that Harris gave you?" She brightly commented that
the letter was from Boston. But Father didn't follow her lead. He
defensively tucked the letter in his inside coat pocket and trotted
up-stairs to read it to Mother.

It was from the Boston agency in whose hands he had left the disposal of
the tea-room lease and of their furniture. The agency had, they wrote,
managed to break t