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 Dad. I guess I know a little about married folks, and what I know about her is that she’d have been tickled to pieces if the Bee Master had said to her, ‘Wilt thou?’ You just bet she’d have ‘wilted’! She’d have ‘wilted’ all over him! But he didn’t ever ask her, and he didn’t ever intend to ask her. He never loved any woman in all the world but Highland Mary, and he let one other woman make a fool of him when he was so lonesome after she was gone, like a chicken tryin’ to peruse around with its head cut off.—Say! That’s a sekert, too! I seem to be spillin’ all I know on you all at once. You might get ’em in line better and hold on to ’em tighter if I told ’em one at a time, and it’d be more sense if I’d tell my own, anyway. He might not like it if I told his. I didn't mean to, either. Just sayin’ that about Margaret Cameron made me think how I could’ve told her any time she was whirling like a button on a barn door that there wasn’t nothin’ to it except that he thought she was clean, and he thought she was fine, and he’d rather play cribbage or checkers with her than to sit and think about the awful thing that happened to the woman he liked best and to his little Mary. No, she needn’t ever thought it was her he liked best, ’cause it wasn’t. It was just ‘as is’ little old me! And why I know it is like I told you before. ’Cause he said so! And he wouldn’t have to say so if he didn’t want to. Nobody asked him. Nobody pushed him off the springboard. He took the high dive all by himself.”

“Well, then,” said Jamie, “if he loved you like that,