‘Ah 1’ she cried, her little white teeth gripping one end of the grassy cord whilst she wound the other about the stems of the water-lilies, ‘I can see you know what I mean. Using bad language in the very face of death and danger! I wonder you wasn’t drowned for a judgment.’
‘Oh, come,’ Paul answered. ‘I didn’t use bad language.’
‘Oh, yes, you did, though,’ she retorted. ‘And I’m not going to be friends with a boy as talks like that.’
‘Not friends!’ said Paul. ‘Why, May?’ He spoke in an accent of incredulous reproach.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m properly shocked, I tell ee. I’m never going to be friends again.’
‘If I thought that was goin’ to be true,’ said Paul, ‘do you know what I’d do?’
‘No, I don’t,’ she answered, ‘and I don’t want to.’
‘I’d hull myself into that brook this minute and never come out again.’
‘You’d do what? she asked.
To ‘hull’ is to hurl in the dialect Paul spoke in youth. The word was strange to her.