Canada -- Fiction; Frontier and pioneer life -- Prairie Provinces -- Fiction
Half an hour later, when she met him, she was very shy. She turned an
adorable pink, and then calmly rebuttoned the two top buttons of her
waist, which had been hanging loose. And I noticed that Percy did
precisely what I saw Dinky-Dunk once doing. He sat staring absently yet
studiously at the milky white column of Olga's neck! And I had to speak
to him twice, before he even woke up to the fact that he was being
addressed by his hostess.
_Wednesday the Fifteenth_
Dinky-Dunk is back, and very busy again. During the day I scarcely get a
glimpse of him, except at meal-times. I have a steadily growing sense of
being neglected, but I know how a worried man hates petulance. The
really important thing is that Percy is giving Olga lessons in reading
and writing. For, although a Finn, she is a Canadian Finn from almost
the shadow of the sub-Arctics, and has had little chance for education.
But her mind is not obtuse.
Yesterday I asked Olga what she thought of Percival Benson. "Ah lak
heem," she calmly admitted in her majestic, monosyllabic way. "He is a
fonny leetle man." And the "fonny leetle man" who isn't really little,
seems to like Olga, odd as it may sound. They are such opposites, such
contradictions! Percy says she's Homeric. He says he never saw eyes that
were so limpid, or such pools of peace and calm. He insists on the fact
that she's essentially maternal, as maternal as the soil over which she
walks, as Percy put it. I told him what Dinky-Dunk had once told me,
about Olga killing a bull. The bull was a vicious brute that had
attacked her father and knocked him down. He was striking at the fallen
man with his fore-paws when Olga heard his cries. She promptly came for
that bull with a pitchfork. And speaking of Homer, it must have been a
pretty epical battle, for she killed the bull and left the fork-tines
eight inches in his body while she picked up her father and carried him
back to the house. And I won't even kill my own hens, but have always
appointed Olie as the executioner.
_Friday the Seventeenth_
It is funny to see Percy teaching Olga. She watches him as though he
were a miracle man. Her dewy red lips form the words slowly, and the
full white throat utters them largely, laboriously, instruments on them,
and in some perhaps uncouth way makes them lovely. I sit with my sewing,
listening. Sometimes I open the piano and play. But I feel out of it. I
seem to be on the fringe of things that are momentous only to other
people. Last night, when Percy said he thought he'd sell his ranch,
Dinky-Dunk looked up from his paper-littered desk and told him to hang
on to that land like a leech. But he didn't explain why.
_Saturday the Nineteenth_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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