reeting. Di was far less taken aback than Lulu.

Later Di had said to Lulu: "I s'pose you heard what we were saying."

Lulu, much shaken, had withdrawn from the whole matter by a flat "no."
"Because," she said to herself, "I couldn't have heard right."

But since then she had looked at Di as if Di were some one else. Had not
Lulu taught her to make buttonholes and to hem--oh, no I Lulu could not
have heard properly.

"Everybody's got somebody to be nice to them," she thought now, sitting
by the kitchen window, adult yet Cinderella.

She thought that some one would come for her. Her mother or even Ina.
Perhaps they would send Monona. She waited at first hopefully, then
resentfully. The grey rain wrapped the air.

"Nobody cares what becomes of me after they're fed," she thought, and
derived an obscure satisfaction from her phrasing, and thought it again.

Ninian Deacon came into the kitchen.

Her first impression was that he had come to see whether the dog had
been fed.

"I fed him," she said, and wished that she had been busy when Ninian
entered.

"Who, me?" he asked. "You did that all right. Say, why in time don't you
come in the other room?"

"Oh, I don't know."

"Well, neither do I. I've kept thinking, 'Why don't she come along.'
Then I remembered the dishes." He glanced about. "I come to help wipe
dishes."

"Oh!" she laughed so delicately, so delightfully, one wondered where she
got it. "They're washed----" she caught herself at "long ago."

"Well then, what are you doing here?"

"Resting."

"Rest in there." He bowed, crooked his arm. "Senora," he said,--his
Spanish matched his other assimilations of travel--

"Senora. Allow me."

Lulu rose. On his arm she entered the parlour. Dwight was narrating and
did not observe that entrance. To the Plows it was sufficiently normal.
But Ina looked up and said:

"Well!"--in two notes, descending, curving.

Lulu did not look at her. Lulu sat in a low rocker. Her starched white
skirt, throwing her chally in ugly lines, revealed a peeping rim of
white embroidery. Her lace front wrinkled when she sat, and perpetually
she adjusted it. She curled her feet sidewise beneath her chair, her
long wrists and veined hands lay along her lap in no relation to her.
She was tense. She rocked.

When Dwight had finished his narration, there was a pause, broken at
last by Mrs. Bett:

"You tell that better than you used to when you started in telling it,"
she observed.