“Do you know something?” he began.  “I think you have it pretty hard around here.”

“I?” Lulu was genuinely astonished.

“Yes, sir.  Do you have to work like this all the time?  I guess you won’t mind my asking.”

“Well, I ought to work.  I have a home with them.  Mother too.”

“Yes, but glory.  You ought to have some kind of a life of your own.  You want it, too.  You told me you did—­that first day.”

She was silent.  Again he was investing her with a longing which she had never really had, until he had planted that longing.  She had wanted she knew not what.  Now she accepted the dim, the romantic interest of this role.

“I guess you don’t see how it seems,” he said, “to me, coming along—­a stranger so.  I don’t like it.”

He frowned, regarded the river, flicked away ashes, his diamond obediently shining.  Lulu’s look, her head drooping, had the liquid air of the look of a young girl.  For the first time in her life she was feeling her helplessness.  It intoxicated her.

“They’re very good to me,” she said.

He turned.  “Do you know why you think that?  Because you’ve never had anybody really good to you.  That’s why.”

“But they treat me good.”

“They make a slave of you.  Regular slave.”  He puffed, frowning.  “Damned shame, I call it,” he said.

Her loyalty stirred Lulu.  “We have our whole living——­”

“And you earn it.  I been watching you since I been here.  Don’t you ever go anywheres?”

She said:  “This is the first place in—­in years.”

“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.