they made, she came to accept them as dumb,
inanimate, harmless. And one day, when Honey, working on the roof,
dropped a screw-driver, she flew down, picked it up, flew back, and
placed it within reach of his hand. She would hover over him for hours,
helping in many small ways. This only, however, when the other men were
sufficiently far away and only when Honey's two hands were occupied. If
any one of them--Honey and the rest--made the most casual of accidental
moves in her direction, her flight was that of an arrow. But nobody
could have been more careful than they not to frighten her.

They always stopped, however, to watch her approach and her departure.
There was something irresistibly feminine about Lulu's flight. She
herself seemed to appreciate this. If anybody looked at her, she
exhibited her accomplishments with an eagerness that had a charming
touch of naivete. She dipped and dove endlessly. She dealt in little
darts and rushes, bird-like in their speed and grace. She never flew
high, but, on her level, her activity was marvelous.

"The supermanning little imp!" Pete Murphy said again and again. "The
vain little devil," Ralph Addington would add, chuckling.

"How the thunder did we ever start to call her the 'plain one'?" Honey
was always asking in an injured tone.

Lulu was far from plain. She was, however, one of those girls who start
by being "ugly" or "queer-looking," or downright "homely," and end by
becoming "interesting" or "picturesque" or "fascinating," according
to the divagations of the individual vocabulary. She had the beaute
troublante. At first sight, you might have called her gipsy, Indian,
Kanaka, Chinese, Japanese, Korean--any exotic type that you had not
seen. Which is to say that she had the look of the primitive woman and
the foreign woman. Superficially, her beauty of irregularity was of all
beauty the most perturbing and provocative. Eyes, skin, hair, she was
all copper-browns and crimson-bronzes, all the high gloss of satiny
surfaces. Every shape and contour was a variant from the regular. Her
eyes took a bewildering slant. Her face showed a little piquant stress
on the cheekbones. Her hair banded in a long, solid, club-like braid. In
repose she bore a look a little sullen, a little heavy. When she smiled,
it seemed as if her whole face waked up; but it was only the glitter of
white teeth in the slit of her scarlet mouth.

Lulu always dressed in browns and greens; leaves, mosses, g