“Would you mind telling me what brought you to this part of the country?” countered Peter.
“My husband,” I curtly retorted. And that chilled him perceptibly. But he saw that I was not to be shuttled aside.
“I was interested,” he explained with a shrug of finality, “in the nesting-ground of the Canada goose!”
“Then you came to the right point,” I promptly retorted. “For I am it!”
But he didn’t smile, as I’d expected him to do. He seemed to feel that something approaching seriousness was expected of that talk.
“I really came because I was more interested in one of your earliest settlers,” he went on. “This settler, I might add, came to your province some three million years ago and is now being exhumed from one of the cut-banks of the Red Deer River. He belongs to the Mesozoic order of archisaurian gentlemen known as Dinosauria, and there’s about a car-load of him. This interest in one of your cretaceous dinosaur skeletons would imply, of course, that I’m wedded to science. And I am, though to nothing else. I’m as free as the wind, dear lady, or I wouldn’t be holidaying here with a tractor-plow that makes my legs ache and a prairie Penelope, who, for some reason or other, has the power of making my heart ache.”
“Verboten!” I promptly interjected.
Peter saluted and then sighed.
“There are things up here even more interesting than your Edmonton formation,” he remarked. “But I was born a Quaker, you see, and I can’t get rid of my self-control!”
“I like you for that,” I rather depressed him by saying. “For I find that one accepts you, Peter, as one accepts a climate. You’re intimate in your very remoteness.”