"I can't help your troubles that way," said Jenny. "Perhaps you'd like to have married me in the cradle?"
"I'd like to have kept 'ee locked up from the time you were a frothy maiden," he admitted. "I do sweat when I think of men's eyes staring at your lovely lill body."
Jenny stamped her rage at the allusion.
"Yes, you ought to have known my mother's aunts," she said. "They'd have suited you, I think. They wanted to shut me up and make me religious."
The emphasis with which she armed her reminiscence gave the verbs an undue value, as if the aunts had intended actually to lock her in a larder of hymn-books.
"I wish with all my heart they had done so," said Trewhella. "Better that than the devil's palace of light where you belonged to dance. Oh, I wish that Cockney were in Hell."
"I can't do more than ask him to go away, so don't keep on being rude about my friends," said Jenny.
"Ess, and I wish now I'd never kicked up such a rig and frightened the pair of 'ee. He was too quick. That's where it's to."
"What are you talking about?"
"Why, if I hadn't been so straight out, I might have trapped you both fitty. If I'd waited and watched awhile."