Lulu, much shaken, had withdrawn from the whole matter by a flat "no."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! 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. "Señora," he said,--his
Spanish matched his other assimilations of travel--
"Señora. 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. "You got in some things I guess you used to clean forget
about. Monona, get off my rocker."
Monona made a little whimpering sound, in pretence to tears. Ina said
"Darling--quiet!"--chin a little lifted, lower lip revealing lower
teeth for the word's completion; and she held it.
The Plows were asking something about Mexico. Dwight was wondering if it
would let up raining _at all_. Di and Jenny came whispering into the
room. But all these distractions Ninian Deacon swept aside.
"Miss Lulu," he said, "I wanted you to hear about my trip up the Amazon,
because I knew how interested you are in travels."
He talked, according to his lights, about the Amazon. But the person who
most enjoyed the recital could not afterward have told two words that
he said. Lulu kept the position which she had taken at first, and she
dare not change. She saw the blood in the veins of her hands and wanted
to hide them. She wondered if she might fold her arms, or have one hand
to support her chin, gave it all up and sat motionless, save for the
rocking.
Then she forgot everything. For the first time in years some one was
talking and looking not only at Ina and Dwight and their guests, but at
her.