life and she’d never got over it. Then she hated to see me eating with my knife. Well, there it was, pick and nag everlasting. But I s’pose, Anne, to be fair, I was cantankerous too. I didn’t try to improve as I might have done . . . I just got cranky and disagreeable when she found fault. I told her one day she hadn’t complained of my grammar when I proposed to her. It wasn’t an overly tactful thing to say. A woman would forgive a man for beating her sooner than for hinting she was too much pleased to get him. Well, we bickered along like that and it wasn’t exactly pleasant, but we might have got used to each other after a spell if it hadn’t been for Ginger. Ginger was the rock we split on at last. Emily didn’t like parrots and she couldn’t stand Ginger’s profane habits of speech. I was attached to the bird for my brother the sailor’s sake. My brother the sailor was a pet of mine when we were little tads and he’d sent Ginger to me when he was dying. I didn’t see any sense in getting worked up over his swearing. There’s nothing I hate worse’n profanity in a human being, but in a parrot, that’s just repeating what it’s heard with no more understanding of it than I’d have of Chinese, allowances might be made. But Emily couldn’t see it that way. Women ain’t logical. She tried to break Ginger of swearing but she hadn’t any better success than she had in trying to make me stop saying ‘I seen’ and ‘them things.’ Seemed as if the more she tried the worse Ginger got, same as me.
“Well, things went on like this, both of us getting
