"Oh, you wouldn't limit such a word as delicious to things we eat," remonstrated Aunt Valeria. "That's a point where I've always differed from Byron."
"Then I'm surprised to hear it, for it's one of the few things he got right."
The younger woman withdrew into her shell, making no rejoinder, but pausing at the bottom of the stairs on her way back to her work, with an air of perfunctory deference, to hear her mother out. Ethan watched the two with interest, feeling that he and his aunt were in the same boat.
"We can't be too jealous of guarding the purity and honesty of language," Mrs. Gano said, firmly. "Any one who has the smallest pretence to caring for letters or for accuracy, or for truth, must do what he can to oppose the debasing of the current coin of speech. If you use words loosely, you'll begin to think loosely, and in the end you'll find you've lost your sense of values, and one word means no more than another. You'll be like Ethan here, who tells me 'bonny clabber' is perfectly splendid, and that he 'loves' Jerusha's Johnny-cake. After that, he mustn't say he loves you and me. It would be like kissing us after the cat."
"It's a kitten," said Ethan, feeling froward and very bold.
His grandmother laughed delightedly.
"Oh, very well, we'll be accurate, if it's only about a kitten that I haven't so much as seen."
The child flashed out to the veranda and returned with a small basket, in which lay a diminutive coal-black object.
"You said you didn't like animals," he observed, reproachfully.
"I don't—not in the house."