A FISHERMAN'S HOUSE
[FLY, MY HEART!]
FLY, MY HEART!
They called her Sabine Bob—"S'been Bob"—because her real name was Sabine Anne Boudrot; and being a Boudrot in Petit Espoir is like being a Smith or a Brown in our part of the world, only ten times more so, for in that little fishing-port of Cape Breton, down in the Maritime Provinces, practically everybody belongs to the abounding tribe. Boudrot, therefore, having ceased to possess more than a modicum of specificity (to borrow a term from the logicians), the custom has arisen of tagging the various generations and households of Boudrots with the familiar name of the father that begat them.
And thus Sabine Anne Boudrot, "old girl" of fifty, was known only as Sabine Bob, and Mary Boudrot, her friend, to whom she was dictating a love-letter on a certain August evening, was known only as Mary Willee—with the accent so strongly on the final syllable that it sounded like Marywil-Lee. Sabine Bob was in service; always had been. Mary kept house for an invalid father. But there was no social distinction between the two.