He was growing too old to put up with strangers.

He made a second vicious attempt to peck at the hand held out to soothe him, and screamed, as he did so, in the usual discordant and unpleasant voice of an angry or frightened parrot.
"Why, Felix," Muriel put in, taking him by the arm with a girlish gesture--for even the terrors by which they were surrounded hadn't wholly succeeded in killing out the woman within her--"how clumsy you are! You don't understand one bit how to manage parrots.

I had a parrot of my own at my aunt's in Australia, and I know their ways and all about them.

Just let me try him." She held out her soft white hand toward the sulky bird with a fearless, caressing gesture.

"Pretty Poll, pretty Poll!" she said, in English, in the conventional tone of address to their kind.