Here the kind and honest Adam Bede goes a-wooing, offering to help Hetty carry a heavy basket.  She’s indifferent to his gallantry, as Eliot puts it, not giving two hoots for the details of ant life.

‘… and been as long getting to the house as a little ant carrying a caterpillar.’

Source: George Eliot, Adam Bede (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 (1859)), p. 267

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