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.
The excitement of this had hardly died down when Frank Merrill brought
the tale of another adventure to camp. He had fallen into the habit of
withdrawing late in the afternoon to one of the reefs, far enough away
to read and to write quietly. One day, just as he had gone deep into his
book, a shadow fell across it. Startled, he looked up. Directly over his
head, pasted on the sky like a scarlet V, hovered the "dark one." After
his first instant of surprise and a second interval of perplexity, he
put his book down, settled himself back quietly, and watched. Conscious
of his espionage apparently, she flew away, floated, flew back, floated,
flew up, flew down, floated - always within a little distance. After
half an hour of this aerial irresolution, she sailed off. She repeated
her performance the next afternoon and the next, and the next, staying
longer each time. By the end of the week she was spending whole
afternoons there. She, too, became a regular visitor.