Miss Lulu Bett | Page 9

at the pies. "Poor old girl," he was
thinking.
"Is it Miss Lulu Bett?" he abruptly inquired. "Or Mrs.?"
Lulu flushed in anguish.
"Miss," she said low, as one who confesses the extremity of failure.
Then from unplumbed depths another Lulu abruptly spoke up. "From
choice," she said.
He shouted with laughter.
"You bet! Oh, you bet!" he cried. "Never doubted it." He made his
palms taut and drummed on the table. "Say!" he said.
Lulu glowed, quickened, smiled. Her face was another face.
"Which kind of a Mr. are you?" she heard herself ask, and his shoutings
redoubled. Well! Who would have thought it of her?
"Never give myself away," he assured her. "Say, by George, I never
thought of that before! There's no telling whether a man's married or
not, by his name!"
"It don't matter," said Lulu.
"Why not?"
"Not so many people want to know."
Again he laughed. This laughter was intoxicating to Lulu. No one ever
laughed at what she said save Herbert, who laughed at her. "Go it, old
girl!" Ninian was thinking, but this did not appear.

The child Monona now arrived, banging the front gate and hurling
herself round the house on the board walk, catching the toe of one foot
in the heel of the other and blundering forward, head down, her short,
straight hair flapping over her face. She landed flat-footed on the porch.
She began to speak, using a ridiculous perversion of words, scarcely
articulate, then in vogue in her group. And,
"Whose dog?" she shrieked.
Ninian looked over his shoulder, held out his hand, finished something
that he was saying to Lulu. Monona came to him readily enough,
staring, loose-lipped.
"I'll bet I'm your uncle," said Ninian.
Relationship being her highest known form of romance, Monona was
thrilled by this intelligence.
"Give us a kiss," said Ninian, finding in the plural some vague
mitigation for some vague offence.
Monona, looking silly, complied. And her uncle said my stars, such a
great big tall girl--they would have to put a board on her head.
"What's that?" inquired Monona. She had spied his great diamond ring.
"This," said her uncle, "was brought to me by Santa Claus, who keeps a
jewellery shop in heaven."
The precision and speed of his improvisation revealed him. He had
twenty other diamonds like this one. He kept them for those Sundays
when the sun comes up in the west. Of course--often! Some day he was
going to melt a diamond and eat it. Then you sparkled all over in the
dark, ever after. Another diamond he was going to plant. They
say----He did it all gravely, absorbedly. About it he was as
conscienceless as a savage. This was no fancy spun to pleasure a child.
This was like lying, for its own sake.

He went on talking with Lulu, and now again he was the tease, the
braggart, the unbridled, unmodified male.
Monona stood in the circle of his arm. The little being was attentive,
softened, subdued. Some pretty, faint light visited her. In her listening
look, she showed herself a charming child.
"It strikes me," said Ninian to Lulu, "that you're going to do something
mighty interesting before you die."
It was the clear conversational impulse, born of the need to keep
something going, but Lulu was all faith.
She closed the oven door on her pies and stood brushing flour from her
fingers. He was looking away from her, and she looked at him. He was
completely like his picture. She felt as if she were looking at his picture
and she was abashed and turned away.
"Well, I hope so," she said, which had certainly never been true, for her
old formless dreams were no intention--nothing but a mush of
discontent. "I hope I can do something that's nice before I quit," she
said. Nor was this hope now independently true, but only this
surprising longing to appear interesting in his eyes. To dance before
him. "What would the folks think of me, going on so?" she suddenly
said. Her mild sense of disloyalty was delicious. So was his
understanding glance.
"You're the stuff," he remarked absently.
She laughed happily.
The door opened. Ina appeared.
"Well!" said Ina. It was her remotest tone. She took this man to be a
pedlar, beheld her child in his clasp, made a quick, forward step, chin
lifted. She had time for a very javelin of a look at Lulu.
"Hello!" said Ninian. He had the one formula. "I believe I'm your

husband's brother. Ain't this Ina?"
It had not crossed the mind of Lulu to present him.
Beautiful it was to see Ina relax, soften, warm, transform, humanise. It
gave one hope for the whole species.
"Ninian!" she cried. She lent a faint impression of the double