“No,” said Honey regretfully, “I don’t seem to remember anything but her face.”
The next morning when they were working, Pete Murphy suddenly yelled in an excited voice, “Here comes one of them!”
Everybody turned. There, heading straight towards them, an unbelievable orange patch sailing through the blue sky, flew the “plain one.”
“Lulu! Lulu! Here I am, Lulu,” Honey called in his most coaxing tone and with his most radiant smile. Lulu did not descend, but, involuntarily it seemed, she turned her course a little nearer to Honey. She fluttered an instant over his head, then flew straight as an arrow eastward.
“She’s a looker, all right, all right,” Ralph Addington said, gazing as long as she was in sight. “I guess I’ll trade my blonde for your brunette, Honey.”
“I bet you won’t,” answered Honey. “I’ve got Lulu half-tamed. She’ll be eating out of my hand in another week.”
They found this incident exciting enough to justify them in laying off from work the rest of the afternoon. But they had to get accustomed to it in the week that followed. Thereafter, some time during the day, the cry would ring out, “Here’s your girl, Honey!” And Honey, not even dropping his tools, would smile over his shoulder at the approaching Lulu.
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.