quite fond of it. I went to a lovely concert--two weeks
ago."

They all listened. Strange indeed to think of Lulu as having had
experiences of which they did not know.

"Yes," she said. "It was in Savannah, Georgia." She flushed, and lifted
her eyes in a manner of faint defiance. "Of course," she said, "I don't
know the names of all the different instruments they played, but there
were a good many." She laughed pleasantly as a part of her sentence.
"They had some lovely tunes," she said. She knew that the subject was
not exhausted and she hurried on. "The hall was real large," she
superadded, "and there were quite a good many people there. And it was
too warm."

"I see," said Cornish, and said what he had been waiting to say: That he
too had been in Savannah, Georgia.

Lulu lit with pleasure. "Well!" she said. And her mind worked and she
caught at the moment before it had escaped. "Isn't it a pretty city?"
she asked. And Cornish assented with the intense heartiness of the
provincial. He, too, it seemed, had a conversational appearance to
maintain by its own effort. He said that he had enjoyed being in that
town and that he was there for two hours.

"I was there for a week." Lulu's superiority was really pretty.

"Have good weather?" Cornish selected next.

Oh, yes. And they saw all the different buildings--but at her "we" she
flushed and was silenced. She was colouring and breathing quickly. This
was the first bit of conversation of this sort of Lulu's life.

After supper Ina inevitably proposed croquet, Dwight pretended to try to
escape and, with his irrepressible mien, talked about Ina, elaborate in
his insistence on the third person--"She loves it, we have to humour
her, you know how it is. Or no! You don't know! But you will"--and more
of the same sort, everybody laughing heartily, save Lulu, who looked
uncomfortable and wished that Dwight wouldn't, and Mrs. Bett, who paid
no attention to anybody that night, not because she had not been
introduced, an omission, which she had not even noticed, but merely as
another form of "tantrim." A self-indulgence.

They emerged for croquet. And there on the porch sat Jenny Plow and
Bobby, waiting for Di to keep an old engagement, which Di pretended to
have forgotten, and to be frightfully annoyed to have to keep. She met
the objections of her parents with all the batteries of her coquetry,
set for both Bobby and Cornish and, bold in the presence of "company,"
at last