As time went by, she ventured nearer and nearer, stayed longer and longer.  Honey, calmly driving nails, addressed to her an endless, chaffing monologue.  At first, it was apparent she was as much repelled by the tools as she was fascinated by Honey.  For him to throw a nail to the ground was the signal for her to speed to the zenith.  But gradually, in spite of the noise they made, she came to accept them as dumb, inanimate, harmless.  And one day, when Honey, working on the roof, dropped a screw-driver, she flew down, picked it up, flew back, and placed it within reach of his hand.  She would hover over him for hours, helping in many small ways.  This only, however, when the other men were sufficiently far away and only when Honey’s two hands were occupied.  If any one of them — Honey and the rest — made the most casual of accidental moves in her direction, her flight was that of an arrow.  But nobody could have been more careful than they not to frighten her.

They always stopped, however, to watch her approach and her departure.  There was something irresistibly feminine about Lulu’s flight.  She herself seemed to appreciate this.  If anybody looked at her, she exhibited her accomplishments with an eagerness that had a charming touch of naivete.  She dipped and dove endlessly.  She dealt in little darts and rushes, bird-like in their speed and grace.  She never flew high, but, on her level, her activity was marvelous.

“The supermanning little imp!” Pete Murphy said again and again.  “The vain little devil,” Ralph Addington would add, chuckling.

“How the thunder did we ever start to call her the ’plain one’?” Honey was always asking in an injured tone.

Lulu was far from plain.  She was, however, one of those girls who start by being “ugly” or “queer-looking,” or downright “homely,” and end by becoming “interesting” or “picturesque” or “fascinating,” according to the divagations of the individual vocabulary.  She had the beaute troublante.  At first sight, you might have called her gipsy, Indian, Kanaka, Chinese, Japanese, Korean — any exotic type that you had not seen.  Which is to say that she had the look of the primitive woman and the foreign woman.  Superficially, her beauty of irregularity was of all beauty the most perturbing and provocative.  Eyes, skin, hair, she was all copper-browns and crimson-bronzes, all the high gloss of satiny surfaces.  Every shape and contour was a variant from the regular.  Her eyes took a bewildering slant.  Her face showed a little piquant stress on the cheekbones.  Her hair banded in a long, solid, club-like braid.  In repose she bore a look a little sullen, a little heavy.  When she smiled, it seemed as if her whole face waked up; but it was only the glitter of white teeth in the slit of her scarlet mouth.

Lulu always dressed in browns and greens; leaves, mosses, grasses made a dim-colored, velvety fabric that contrasted richly with her coppery satin surfaces and her brilliant orange wings.