“Funny little girl,” he said. “Suppose instead of quoting poetry you speak to me, and instead of looking at sunsets, you look at me.”
“Reggie, don’t you like poetry then?”
“It’s all right enough, I suppose, but I’d rather have straight English words. What’s the sense of muddling one’s language? Silly, I call it,” he said.
I felt disappointed. Our family had always loved poetry. Mama used to read Tennyson’s “Idyls of the King,” and we knew all of the characters, and even played them as children. Moreover, papa and Ada and Charles and even Nora could all write poetry. Ada made up poems about every little incident in our lives. When papa went to England, mama would make us little children all kneel down in a row and repeat a prayer to God that she had made up to send him back soon. Ada wrote a lovely poem about God hearing us. She also wrote a poem about our Panama hen who died. She said the wicked cock hen, a hen we had that could crow like a cock, had killed her. How we laughed over that poem. I was sorry Reggie thought it was nonsense, and I wished he would not laugh or sneer at all the things we did and liked.
“Dinner is ready pour m’sieu et madame!”
Gracious! That man thought I was Reggie’s wife. I colored to my ears, and I was glad Reggie did not understand French.
He had set the table for two and there was a big sixteen pound turkey on it, smelling so good and looking brown and delicious. I am sure our Canadian turkeys are better than any I have ever tasted anywhere else. They certainly are not “cold-storage birds.”
They charged Reggie for that whole sixteen-pound turkey. He thought it a great joke, but I wanted to take the rest home. The tide being against us, we left the rowboat at the hotel with instructions to return it, and we took the train back to Montreal.
Coming home on the train, the conductor proved to be a young man who had gone to school with me and he came up with his hand held out:
“Hallo, Marion!”