Roberts, in extreme embarrassment: “Yes, yes, certainly; I shall be very glad to explain, if you’ll just step here to the corner. We’re attracting attention where we are—”
McIlheny: “Attintion! Do ye suppose I care for attintion, when it’s me wife that’s been insulted?” He follows Roberts up, with Mrs. McIlheny, as he retires to the corner where she had been sitting, out of the way of the people coming and going. Campbell, after a moment, closes his magazine, and joins them.
Roberts: “Insulted? By no manner of means! Nothing was further from my thoughts. I—I—can explain it all in a moment, my dear sir, if you will have patience; I can indeed. I have the highest respect for the lady, and I’m quite incapable of offering her an affront. The fact is—I hardly know how to begin—”
McIlheny: “Go ahn, sor; or I’ll have to do the beginnun’ meself, pretty soon.” He shifts himself from one foot to another with a saltatory briskness.
Roberts: “The fact is, my wife had engaged a cook, up-town, and she had sent her down here to meet me, and go out with me to our summer place at Weston.”
McIlheny: “An’ fwhat has all that rigamarole to do wid your speakin’ to a lady ye’d never been inthrojuced to? Fwhat had yer wife’s cuke to do with Mrs. McIlheny?”
Roberts: “Why, I didn’t know the cook by sight, you see. My wife had engaged her up-town, and appointed her to meet me here, without reflecting that I had never seen her, and wouldn’t know who she was, when I did see her; she partly expected to be here herself, and so I didn’t reflect, either.”
McIlheny, with signs of an amicable interest: “An’ she lift ye to mate a lady ye never had seen before, and expicted ye to know her by soight?”
Roberts: “Precisely.”
McIlheny, smiling: “Well, that’s loike a wooman, Mary; ye can’t say it ain’t.”