about him, were
they? He straightened. "Huh!" he said, in magnificent evasion.

"I had to make them stop, so I teased you. I--I never wanted to." Again
the upward look.

"Well!" Bobby stared at her. "I never thought it was anything like
that."

"Of course you didn't." She tossed back her bright hair, met his eyes
full. "And you never came where I could tell you. I wanted to tell you."

She ran into the house.

Lulu lowered her eyes. It was as if she had witnessed the exercise of
some secret gift, had seen a cocoon open or an egg hatch. She was
thinking:

"How easy she done it. Got him right over. But _how_ did she do that?"

Dusting the Dwight-like piano, Lulu looked over-shoulder, with a manner
of speculation, at the photograph of Ninian.

Bobby mowed and pondered. The magnificent conceit of the male in his
understanding of the female character was sufficiently developed to
cause him to welcome the improvisation which he had just heard. Perhaps
that was the way it had been. Of course that was the way it had been.
What a fool he had been not to understand. He cast his eyes repeatedly
toward the house. He managed to make the job last over so that he could
return in the afternoon. He was not conscious of planning this, but it
was in some manner contrived for him by forces of his own with which he
seemed to be cooeperating without his conscious will. Continually he
glanced toward the house.

These glances Lulu saw. She was a woman of thirty-four and Di and Bobby
were eighteen, but Lulu felt for them no adult indulgence. She felt that
sweetness of attention which we bestow upon May robins. She felt more.

She cut a fresh cake, filled a plate, called to Di, saying: "Take some
out to that Bobby Larkin, why don't you?"

It was Lulu's way of participating. It was her vicarious thrill.

After supper Dwight and Ina took their books and departed to the
Chautauqua Circle. To these meetings Lulu never went. The reason seemed
to be that she never went anywhere.

When they were gone Lulu felt an instant liberation. She turned
aimlessly to the garden and dug round things with her finger. And she
thought about the brightness of that Chautauqua scene to which Ina and
Dwight had gone. Lulu thought about such gatherings in somewhat the way
that a futurist receives the subjects of his art--forms not vague, but
heightened to intolerable definiteness, acute colour, and always
motion--motion as an integral part of the desirabl