here. They act as if I was ten years
old."

Abruptly in Lulu's face there came a light of understanding.

"Why, Di," she said, "do you feel that way too?"

Di missed this. She went on:

"I'm grown up. I feel just as grown up as they do. And I'm not allowed
to do a thing I feel. I want to be away--I will be away!"

"I know about that part," Lulu said.

She now looked at Di with attention. Was it possible that Di was
suffering in the air of that home as she herself suffered? She had not
thought of that. There Di had seemed so young, so dependent,
so--asquirm. Here, by herself, waiting for Bobby, in the Hess House at
Millton, she was curiously adult. Would she be adult if she were let
alone?

"You don't know what it's like," Di cried, "to be hushed up and laughed
at and paid no attention to, everything you say."

"Don't I?" said Lulu. "Don't I?"

She was breathing quickly and looking at Di. If _this_ was why Di was
leaving home....

"But, Di," she cried, "do you love Bobby Larkin?"

By this Di was embarrassed. "I've got to marry somebody," she said, "and
it might as well be him."

"But is it him?"

"Yes, it is," said Di. "But," she added, "I know I could love almost
anybody real nice that was nice to me." And this she said, not in her
own right, but either she had picked it up somewhere and adopted it, or
else the terrible modernity and honesty of her day somehow spoke through
her, for its own. But to Lulu it was as if something familiar turned its
face to be recognised.

"Di!" she cried.

"It's true. You ought to know that." She waited for a moment. "You did
it," she added. "Mamma said so."

At this onslaught Lulu was stupefied. For she began to perceive its
truth.

"I know what I want to do, I guess," Di muttered, as if to try to cover
what she had said.

Up to that moment, Lulu had been feeling intensely that she understood
Di, but that Di did not know this. Now Lulu felt that she and Di
actually shared some unsuspected sisterhood. It was not only that they
were both badgered by Dwight. It was more than that. They were two
women. And she must make Di know that she understood her.

"Di," Lulu said, breathing hard, "what you just said is true, I guess.
Don't you think I don't know. And now I'm going to tell you--"

She might have poured it all out, claimed her kinship with Di by virtue
of that which had happened in Savannah, Georgia. But Di said:

"Here come some ladies. And goodness, look at