"Not if you've a headache."

"Oh, very well, then."

"What are you two quarrelling about?" cried a gay voice behind us,
and we looked round into the laughing eyes of Miss Dale. She was
the one cottager we knew in Saratoga, but when we were with her we
felt that we knew everybody, so hospitable was the sense of world
which her kindness exhaled.

"It was Mrs. March who was quarrelling," I said. "I was only trying
to convince her that she was wrong, and of course one has to lift
one's voice. I hope I hadn't the effect of halloaing."

"Well, I merely heard you above the steam harmonicon at the
switchback," said Miss Dale. "I don't know whether you call THAT
holloaing."

"Oh, Miss Dale," said my wife, "we are in such a fatal--"

"Pickle," I suggested, and she instantly adopted the word in her
extremity.

"--pickle with some people that Providence has thrown in our way,
and that we want to do something for"; and in a labyrinth of
parentheses that no man could have found his way into or out of, she
possessed Miss Dale of the whole romantic fact. "It was Mr. March,
of course, who first discovered them," she concluded, in plaintive
accusation.