“Yes, she will; the more the merrier. Come along.”
Vivienne laughed and followed him near the Irish lady, who was preposterously and outrageously fat. A living tide was slowly rolling over her, obliterating all landmarks of a comely person. Her ankles were effaced; her waist was gone. Her wrists had disappeared, and her neck had sunk into her shoulders. Cheeks and chin were a wide crimson expanse, yet her lazy, handsome blue eyes looked steadily out, in no wise affrighted by the oncoming sea of flesh.
“Mamma always does this,” said Patrick gleefully. “She doesn’t know any more about geography than a tabby cat, and she won’t learn till she gets to a place. Look at the little man writhing before her. She has called his dear land Nova Zembla six times. Listen to him.”
“Madam,” the Nova Scotian was saying, “this is Nova Scotia. Nova Zembla is situated in the Arctic regions. It is a land of icebergs and polar bears. I scarcely think it has any inhabitants.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Mrs. Macartney, shaking her portly person with a good-natured laugh. “The names are so much alike that they confuse me. I only know that one is a cold place and the other a warm one, that one is in North America and the other in South.”
“Madam,” he said desperately, and shifting his feet about on a coil of rope on which he had taken refuge, “Nova Zembla is in the north of Europe. We are in North America.”
“Are we?” she said amiably; “then we haven’t come to Canada yet?”
“Oh yes, madam, we have. Nova Scotia is in Canada, in the lower southeastern part—nearest England you know. It is the last in the line of provinces that stretch from the Pacific to the Atlantic.”
At the mention of the Pacific, Mrs. Macartney’s lumbering fancy attempted to take flight to the coral groves of Oceanica. “I did not know that Canada bordered on the Pacific,” she returned dubiously. “How near is it?”
“Just three thousand six hundred and sixty-two miles away, madam. The continent lies between us.”