"Are you Professor McCabe?" says she.
"Sure!" I hollers; and Swifty, not lookin' for such strenuous conversation, goes up in the air about two feet.
"I beg pardon," says the old girl; "but will you kindly speak into the audiphone."
So I steps up closer, forgettin' that I still has the clutch on Swifty, and drags him along.
"Ahr, chee!" says Swifty. "This ain't no brother act, is it?"
With that I lets him go, and me and Aunt Isabella gets down to business. I was lookin' for some tale about Purdy—tell you about him some day—but it looks like this was a new deal; for she opens up by askin' if I knew a party by the name of Dennis Whaley.
"Do I?" says I. "I've known Dennis ever since I can remember knowin' anybody. He's runnin' my place out to Primrose Park now."
"I thought so," says Aunt Isabella. "Then perhaps you know a niece of his, Margaret Whaley?"
I didn't; but I'd heard of her. She's Terence Whaley's girl, that come over from Skibbereen four or five years back, after near starvin' to death one wet season when the potato crop was so bad. Well, it seems Maggie has worked a couple of years for Aunt Isabella as kitchen girl. Then she's got ambitious, quit service, and got a flatwork job in a hand laundry—eight per, fourteen hours a day, Saturday sixteen.
I didn't tumble why all this was worth chinnin' about until Aunt Isabella reminds me that she's president and board of directors of the Lady Pot Wrestlers' Improvement Society. She's one of the kind that spends her time tryin' to organise study classes for hired girls who have different plans for spendin' their Thursday afternoons off.