“Why, you can’t live a week at Frog Farm without patronizing me. Who else is there? There isn’t hardly a trap to be had even miles around. Why there was a young man I drove out to Frog Farm last week, and a fine to-do he had getting home!”
It was not calculated to soothe him. “And what need had you to drive a young man?”
“It was for Maria—your mother’s pig. She was ill; her whole litter might have been lost.”
He frowned more darkly. Pigs, he had but just admitted, might reasonably come into the feminine ambit: still, if girls did get to know coarse facts, they might at least have the decency not to talk about them. “And did he call you Jinny?” he grunted.
“He didn’t call me Maria.”
“Well, traps or no traps,” he said sullenly, “you’ll get no orders from me. I’ve fended for myself in the Canadian backwoods, where there wasn’t even a woman to sew on buttons, and I certainly don’t need one now.”
But she was still smiling. “Do you know the song of the dashing young lad from Buckingham?”
“I know you do. But what’s that to do with it?”
She re-started the merry tune, but markedly altered the words:
“A dashing young lad from—Canada,