"Jealous? No, it's not anything like that. You ain't good at guessin', Sis; girls never air."
"Not even Ginnie Miller," said Rachel. She usually met Ike's hackneyed allusions to the inferiority of girls by some word about Ginnie. It was plain her brother was in a teasing mood, and that her baffled curiosity would not find satisfaction by coaxing. She knew well enough that Ike was not such a fool as to keep an interesting secret long enough for it to grow stale and unmarketable on his hands.
"Let it go,—I don't care," she said, as she got up and moved about the kitchen.
"You would, if you knew," said Ike.
"But I don't, and so there's an end of it"; and she began to hum a sentimental song of the languishing sort so much in vogue in that day. The melancholy refrain, which formed the greater part of this one, ran:
"Long, long ago, long ago."
It is one of the paradoxes of human nature that young women with all the world before them delight in singing retrospective melodies about an auld-lang-syne concerning which, in the very nature of the case, they cannot well know anything, but in regard to which they seem to entertain sentiments so distressful.
"It wasn't so very long ago, nuther," said Ike, whose dialect was always intensified when there were harvest hands on the place.
"What wasn't?" said Rachel, with her back to him.
"Why, Tom's scrape, of course."