"Lord. Don't you want to? Of course you do!"
"Not so much places like this----"
"I see. What you want is to get away--like you'd ought to." He regarded
her. "You've been a blamed fine-looking woman," he said.
She did not flush, but that faint, unsuspected Lulu spoke for her:
"You must have been a good-looking man once yourself."
His laugh went ringing across the water. "You're pretty good," he said.
He regarded her approvingly. "I don't see how you do it," he mused,
"blamed if I do."
"How I do what?"
"Why come back, quick like that, with what you say."
Lulu's heart was beating painfully. The effort to hold her own in talk
like this was terrifying. She had never talked in this fashion to any
one. It was as if some matter of life or death hung on her ability to
speak an alien tongue. And yet, when she was most at loss, that other
Lulu, whom she had never known anything about, seemed suddenly to speak
for her. As now:
"It's my grand education," she said.
She sat humped on the log, her beautiful hair shining in the light of
the warm sky. She had thrown off her hat and the linen duster, and was
in her blue gingham gown against the sky and leaves. But she sat
stiffly, her feet carefully covered, her hands ill at ease, her eyes
rather piteous in their hope somehow to hold her vague own. Yet from her
came these sufficient, insouciant replies.
"Education," he said laughing heartily. "That's mine, too." He spoke a
creed. "I ain't never had it and I ain't never missed it."
"Most folks are happy without an education," said Lulu.
"You're not very happy, though."
"Oh, no," she said.
"Well, sir," said Ninian, "I'll tell you what we'll do. While I'm here
I'm going to take you and Ina and Dwight up to the city."
"To the city?"
"To a show. Dinner and a show. I'll give you _one_ good time."
"Oh!" Lulu leaned forward. "Ina and Dwight go sometimes. I never been."
"Well, just you come with me. I'll look up what's good. You tell me
just what you like to eat, and we'll get it----"
She said: "I haven't had anything to eat in years that I haven't cooked
myself."
He planned for that time to come, and Lulu listened as one intensely
experiencing every word that he uttered. Yet it was not in that future
merry-making that she found her joy, but in the consciousness that
he--some one--any one--was planning like this for her.
Meanwhile Di and Bobby had rounded the corner by an old hop-house and
kept on down the levee. Now that the presence of the others was
withdrawn, the two looked about them differently and began themselves to
give off an influence instead of being pressed upon by overpowering
personalities. Frogs were chorusing in the near swamp, and Bobby wanted
one. He was off after it. But Di eventually drew him back, reluctant,
frogless. He entered upon an exhaustive account of the use of frogs for
bait, and as he talked he constantly flung stones. Di grew restless.
There was, she had found, a certain amount of this to be gone through
before Bobby would focus on the personal. At length she was obliged to
say, "Like me to-day?" And then he entered upon personal talk with the
same zest with which he had discussed bait.
"Bobby," said Di, "sometimes I think we might be married, and not wait
for any old money."
They had now come that far. It was partly an authentic attraction, grown
from out the old repulsion, and partly it was that they both--and
especially Di--so much wanted the experiences of attraction that they
assumed its ways. And then each cared enough to assume the pretty rôle
required by the other, and by the occasion, and by the air of the time.
"Would you?" asked Bobby--but in the subjunctive.