“They must strike a foreigner as peculiar,” said Garwood. “I had never thought of that before.”
“But I’m not a fo’eigneh, you know,” the girl protested.
“Well, you’re pretty near it,” said Emily. “She’s lived abroad all her life, you know—nearly,” she explained aside to Garwood.
Garwood was pleased that the conversation had taken a turn which he could follow. With strange women he found small talk impossible as all men must who are not versed in the banalities of women’s intercourse, though they indulge themselves for hours in the trivialities of men’s gossip.
“I have never thought of it before,” said Garwood, “but most of our political phrases savor of our young agricultural life; perhaps I would better say our pioneer life. There’s ‘log-rolling,’ for instance, and ‘stump speaking,’ and—”
“And setting the prairies on fiah,” Dade added. “I saw in the papah the othah day that you weare doing that—on the stump, they said.”
Garwood laughed again, naturally.
“That was one of Rankin’s inspired tales, no doubt. Rather a mixture of figures, too, setting the prairies on fire from the stump, don’t you think? And you probably saw as well, that some of the Indians over in Moultrie have their knives out, and are after my scalp.”
“That is more than agricultural, or pioneerish,” said Emily; “that’s actually savage.”
“It’s quite deliciously American,” said Miss Emerson.