“My father has told me.”
“What does he know about it?”
“He knows everything. He is very wise. And once he lived there. Men were so wicked that he left them and came away to live here. He brought me with him. Once,” she informed him gravely, “I was a little baby like the twins. I grew up big, you know.”
“Not so dreadfully big,” he protested. “And you live here year in and year out?”
She nodded.
“But the winters? There must be a deuced lot of snow. How do you manage?”
“There is not too damn much snow in here,” she informed him. “The mountains all around are so high they stop much of it.”
“Young ladies in the world outside,” he remarked soberly, though with a twinkle in his eyes, “don’t say ‘damn.’”
“Don’t they?” asked Paula. “Why?”
“They call it a bad word,” he explained. “Maybe it is you, in here, who are bad—”