"'Him' if you like," Mrs Bosenna mused. "It can't possibly be a female, can it?"
"I should trust not, for the sake of a body's sex . . . to say things like that. Besides, I've surely been told somewhere—in the 'Child's Guide to Knowledge,' it may have been—that the females don't talk at all."
"Are you sure of that?"
"Pretty sure. It was something unnatural anyhow; or I shouldn' have remembered it."
"Well, and if so," said Mrs Bosenna, "one can see what Providence was driving at, which is always a comfort. . . . I was wondering now if you mind going and carrying him out to the garden somewhere. He couldn't take harm in this weather,—under the box-hedge, for instance."
Dinah shook her head. "I couldn', mistress; no really!"
"The chances are," said Mrs Bosenna persuasively, "he wouldn't say anything,—anything like that again, not in a blue moon."
"He said it to me first, and he said it to me again not ten minutes later. But, o' course, if you're so confident, there's nothing hinders your goin' and takin' him where you like. If you ask my opinion, though, he don't wait for no blue moons. He turns 'em blue as they come."
Mrs Bosenna tapped her foot yet more pettishly. "It's perfectly ridiculous," she declared, "to be kept out of one's own parlour by a bird! Go and call in William Skin, and tell him to take away the nasty thing."
"And him with a family?"