"My own sister! And she would conspire . . . . . ." I crunched a clump of crust viciously under my heel.
"Well, seeing that you have confessed, I suppose I should own up, too," I said, after a silence. "I never told you that there was a girl out where I worked this summer."
"No? What was she like?" Jean's voice was steady, but I caught a new note in it. It augured well for my first attempt at romancing.
"Oh, she was a nice girl, all right. Her folks thought she would make a good ox, but she didn't quite fall in line. She had that broader vision you set so much on. Sort o' hinted that she and I might do well running a rooming house at Moose Jaw; they say things are humming at the Jaw. Rather suggested——"
"Oh, Frank, she never did! . . . . . Wanted you to marry her, I suppose?"
"No, she didn't just say that. But she's BIG, you know; takes a big view of things. Of course, it might have come to that in time. I remember one afternoon it rained and we couldn't work in the fields and that night she and I went to a dance——"
"Does she dance well?"
"Oh, quite well. And free. You know—nothing standoffish, or anything like that. Well, the storm came up again during the night, and we couldn't get home, and it was only a small farm house so some of us had to sleep in the hayloft, and Nellie said she'd be a dead game sport——"
"Now Frank, don't tell me any more. I don't believe it. . . . . . . . What happened next?"
"Oh, nothing much. It was about noon when we got home, and the old man was pretty sore, but I told him I thought a good deal of Nellie and wouldn't mind marrying her if it came to that, and I asked her to come over here and visit us next summer——"