The iron of those days when she had laughed at him was deep within him, and this she now divined, and said absently: 

“I used to think you were pretty nice.  But I don’t like you any more.”

“Yes, you used to!” Bobby repeated derisively.  “Is that why you made fun of me all the time?”

At this Di coloured and tapped her foot on the well-curb.  He seemed to have her now, and enjoyed his triumph.  But Di looked up at him shyly and looked down.  “I had to,” she admitted.  “They were all teasing me about you.”

“They were?” This was a new thought to him.  Teasing her about him, were they?  He straightened.  “Huh!” he said, in magnificent evasion.

“I had to make them stop, so I teased you.  I—­I never wanted to.”  Again the upward look.

“Well!” Bobby stared at her.  “I never thought it was anything like that.”

“Of course you didn’t.”  She tossed back her bright hair, met his eyes full.  “And you never came where I could tell you.  I wanted to tell you.”

She ran into the house.

Lulu lowered her eyes.  It was as if she had witnessed the exercise of some secret gift, had seen a cocoon open or an egg hatch.  She was thinking: 

“How easy she done it.  Got him right over.  But how did she do that?”

Dusting the Dwight-like piano, Lulu looked over-shoulder, with a manner of speculation, at the photograph of Ninian.

Bobby mowed and pondered.  The magnificent conceit of the male in his understanding of the female character was sufficiently developed to cause him to welcome the improvisation which he had just heard.  Perhaps that was the way it had been.  Of course that was the way it had been.  What a fool he had been not to understand.  He cast his eyes repeatedly toward the house.  He managed to make the job last over so that he could return in the afternoon.  He was not conscious of planning this, but it was in some manner contrived for him by forces of his own with which he seemed to be cooeperating without his conscious will.  Continually he glanced toward the house.

These glances Lulu saw.  She was a woman of thirty-four and Di and Bobby were eighteen, but Lulu felt for them no adult indulgence.  She felt that sweetness of attention which we bestow upon May robins.  She felt more.

She cut a fresh cake, filled a plate, called to Di, saying:  “Take some out to that Bobby Larkin, why don’t you?”

It was Lulu’s way of participating.  It was her vicarious thrill.

After supper Dwight and Ina took their books and departed to the Chautauqua Circle.  To these meetings Lulu never went.  The reason seemed to be that she never went anywhere.