“An inheritance—­really?  How much, Dwight?”

“Now isn’t that like a woman.  Isn’t it?”

“I thought he was from a good family,” said Ina.

“My mercenary little pussy!”

“Well,” she said with a sigh, “I shouldn’t be surprised if Di did really accept him.  A young girl is awfully flattered when a good-looking older man pays her attention.  Haven’t you noticed that?”

Dwight informed her, with an air of immense abstraction, that he left all such matters to her.  Being married to Dwight was like a perpetual rehearsal, with Dwight’s self-importance for audience.

A few evenings later, Cornish brought up the music.  There was something overpowering in this brown-haired chap against the background of his negligible little shop, his whole capital in his few pianos.  For he looked hopefully ahead, woke with plans, regarded the children in the street as if, conceivably, children might come within the confines of his life as he imagined it.  A preposterous little man.  And a preposterous store, empty, echoing, bare of wall, the three pianos near the front, the remainder of the floor stretching away like the corridors of the lost.  He was going to get a dark curtain, he explained, and furnish the back part of the store as his own room.  What dignity in phrasing, but how mean that little room would look—­cot bed, washbowl and pitcher, and little mirror—­almost certainly a mirror with a wavy surface, almost certainly that.

“And then, you know,” he always added, “I’m reading law.”

The Plows had been asked in that evening.  Bobby was there.  They were, Dwight Herbert said, going to have a sing.

Di was to play.  And Di was now embarked on the most difficult feat of her emotional life, the feat of remaining to Bobby Larkin the lure, the beloved lure, the while to Cornish she instinctively played the role of womanly little girl.

“Up by the festive lamp, everybody!” Dwight Herbert cried.

As they gathered about the upright piano, that startled, Dwightish instrument, standing in its attitude of unrest, Lulu came in with another lamp.

“Do you need this?” she asked.

They did not need it, there was, in fact, no place to set it, and this Lulu must have known.  But Dwight found a place.  He swept Ninian’s photograph from the marble shelf of the mirror, and when Lulu had placed the lamp there, Dwight thrust the photograph into her hands.

“You take care of that,” he said, with a droop of lid discernible only to those who—­presumably—­loved him.  His old attitude toward Lulu had shown a terrible sharpening in these ten days since her return.

She stood uncertainly, in the thin black and white gown which Ninian had bought for her, and held Ninian’s photograph and looked helplessly about.  She was moving toward the door when Cornish called: 

“See here!  Aren’t you going to sing?”