Ina was vexed.  She said so, pouting in a fashion which she should have outgrown with white muslin and blue ribbons, and she had outgrown none of these things.

“That just spoils croquet,” she said.  “I’m vexed.  Now we can’t have a real game.”

From the side-door, where she must have been lingering among the waterproofs, Lulu stepped forth.

“I’ll play a game,” she said.

* * * * *

When Cornish actually proposed to bring some music to the Deacons’, Ina turned toward Dwight Herbert all the facets of her responsibility.  And Ina’s sense of responsibility toward Di was enormous, oppressive, primitive, amounting, in fact, toward this daughter of Dwight Herbert’s late wife, to an ability to compress the offices of stepmotherhood into the functions of the lecture platform.  Ina was a fountain of admonition.  Her idea of a daughter, step or not, was that of a manufactured product, strictly, which you constantly pinched and moulded.  She thought that a moral preceptor had the right to secrete precepts.  Di got them all.  But of course the crest of Ina’s responsibility was to marry Di.  This verb should be transitive only when lovers are speaking of each other, or the minister or magistrate is speaking of lovers.  It should never be transitive when predicated of parents or any other third party.  But it is.  Ina was quite agitated by its transitiveness as she took to her husband her incredible responsibility.

“You know, Herbert,” said Ina, “if this Mr. Cornish comes here very much, what we may expect.”

“What may we expect?” demanded Dwight Herbert, crisply.

Ina always played his games, answered what he expected her to answer, pretended to be intuitive when she was not so, said “I know” when she didn’t know at all.  Dwight Herbert, on the other hand, did not even play her games when he knew perfectly what she meant, but pretended not to understand, made her repeat, made her explain.  It was as if Ina had to please him for, say, a living; but as for that dentist, he had to please nobody.  In the conversations of Dwight and Ina you saw the historical home forming in clots in the fluid wash of the community.

“He’ll fall in love with Di,” said Ina.

“And what of that?  Little daughter will have many a man fall in love with her, I should say.”

“Yes, but, Dwight, what do you think of him?”

“What do I think of him?  My dear Ina, I have other things to think of.”

“But we don’t know anything about him, Dwight—­a stranger so.”

“On the other hand,” said Dwight with dignity, “I know a good deal about him.”

With a great air of having done the fatherly and found out about this stranger before bringing him into the home, Dwight now related a number of stray circumstances dropped by Cornish in their chance talks.

“He has a little inheritance coming to him—­shortly,” Dwight wound up.