Cornish paid very little attention to her.  To Lulu he said kindly, “Don’t you play, Miss—?” He had not caught her name—­no stranger ever did catch it.  But Dwight now supplied it:  “Miss Lulu Bett,” he explained with loud emphasis, and Lulu burned her slow red.  This question Lulu had usually answered by telling how a felon had interrupted her lessons and she had stopped “taking”—­a participle sacred to music, in Warbleton.  This vignette had been a kind of epitome of Lulu’s biography.  But now Lulu was heard to say serenely: 

“No, but I’m quite fond of it.  I went to a lovely concert—­two weeks ago.”

They all listened.  Strange indeed to think of Lulu as having had experiences of which they did not know.

“Yes,” she said.  “It was in Savannah, Georgia.”  She flushed, and lifted her eyes in a manner of faint defiance.  “Of course,” she said, “I don’t know the names of all the different instruments they played, but there were a good many.”  She laughed pleasantly as a part of her sentence.  “They had some lovely tunes,” she said.  She knew that the subject was not exhausted and she hurried on.  “The hall was real large,” she superadded, “and there were quite a good many people there.  And it was too warm.”

“I see,” said Cornish, and said what he had been waiting to say:  That he too had been in Savannah, Georgia.

Lulu lit with pleasure.  “Well!” she said.  And her mind worked and she caught at the moment before it had escaped.  “Isn’t it a pretty city?” she asked.  And Cornish assented with the intense heartiness of the provincial.  He, too, it seemed, had a conversational appearance to maintain by its own effort.  He said that he had enjoyed being in that town and that he was there for two hours.

“I was there for a week.”  Lulu’s superiority was really pretty.

“Have good weather?” Cornish selected next.

Oh, yes.  And they saw all the different buildings—­but at her “we” she flushed and was silenced.  She was colouring and breathing quickly.  This was the first bit of conversation of this sort of Lulu’s life.

After supper Ina inevitably proposed croquet, Dwight pretended to try to escape and, with his irrepressible mien, talked about Ina, elaborate in his insistence on the third person—­“She loves it, we have to humour her, you know how it is.  Or no!  You don’t know!  But you will”—­and more of the same sort, everybody laughing heartily, save Lulu, who looked uncomfortable and wished that Dwight wouldn’t, and Mrs. Bett, who paid no attention to anybody that night, not because she had not been introduced, an omission, which she had not even noticed, but merely as another form of “tantrim.”  A self-indulgence.

They emerged for croquet.  And there on the porch sat Jenny Plow and Bobby, waiting for Di to keep an old engagement, which Di pretended to have forgotten, and to be frightfully annoyed to have to keep.  She met the objections of her parents with all the batteries of her coquetry, set for both Bobby and Cornish and, bold in the presence of “company,” at last went laughing away.  And in the minute areas of her consciousness she said to herself that Bobby would be more in love with her than ever because she had risked all to go with him; and that Cornish ought to be distinctly attracted to her because she had not stayed.  She was as primitive as pollen.