"You poor Danny!" Jennie commiserated with him as they together entered the parlour. "The way Margaret uses you, it most makes me sick! Even her hired girl she teaches to disrespect you! Ain't?"
"My life with Margaret is not exactly a 'flowery bed of ease,'" Daniel ruefully admitted.
"If only you hadn't of been so hasty to get married already, Danny! You could of done so much better than what you did!"
"But with all Margaret's faults," Daniel retorted, his pride of possession pricked by the form of Jennie's criticism, "she's the most aristocratic lady I ever met."
"Oh, well, but I don't know about that either, Danny. It seems to me she has some wonderful common ways. I never told you how one day when our hired girl was crying with a headache, Margaret went and put her arm around her yet and called her 'my dear,' and made her lay down till she rubbed her head for her! I told her afterward, she could be good to Emmy without making herself that common with her."
"And what did she say?"
"Och, she just laughed. You know how easy she can laugh. At most anything she can fetch a silly laugh."
Jennie walked into the sitting-room as she talked, inspecting Margaret's makeshift arrangements to conceal the gapes caused by the removal of the furniture which was hers and Sadie's.
"I'm awful sorry, Danny, that you'll have the expense of new furniture, when if Margaret had treated us right, we never would have left you. And the very day you can make her pass her promise that she'll act right to us, we'll be right back."
"I'll never get her to," Daniel pouted. "She's too glad you're gone."