Through those ten years, while she struggled to free the farm from debt, she had scrimped and saved like a miser; and this habit of saving, she knew, would cling to her for the rest of her life. She went without butter; she drank only buttermilk, in order that she might keep nothing back from the market. Her clothes were patched and mended as long as they held together, and she had stopped going to church because her pride would not suffer her to appear there in overalls, or in the faded calico dresses she wore in the house. Though she was obliged to hire women to help her with the milking and in the dairy, she herself worked harder than any of them. Nothing, she told herself grimly, could elude her vigilance. In her passionate recoil from the thriftlessness of the poor, she had developed a nervous dread of indolence which reminded her of her mother. She went to bed, stupefied by fatigue, as soon as the last pound of butter was wrapped for the early train; yet she was up again before the break of day while the hands were still sleeping. And only Fluvanna, who lived in the house with her now, knew the hours she spent beside her lamp counting the pounds of butter and the number of eggs she had sent to market. If only she could save enough to pay off the mortgage and return the money she had borrowed from the Faradays, she felt that she should begin to breathe freely for the first time in her life. And there was more than hard work in her struggle; there was unflagging enterprise as well. Her father had worked harder than she could ever do, toiling summer and winter, day and night, over the crops, which always failed because they were expected to thrive on so little. She remembered him perpetually hauling manure or shredding fodder, until he loomed in her memory as a titanic image of the labourer who labours without hope. "The truth is, I would rather have failed at the start than have gone on like that," she thought. "I was able to take risks because I was too unhappy to be afraid." Yes, she had had the courage of desperation, and that had saved her from failure. Without borrowed money, without the courage to borrow money, she could never have made the farm even a moderate success. This had required not only perseverance but audacity as well; and it had required audacity again to permeate the methodical science of farming with the spirit of adventure. Interest, excitement even, must be instilled into the heartless routine. The hours of work never varied. Chores were done by necessity, as in the old days without system, but by the stroke of the clock. Each milker had her own place, and milked always the same cows. After the first trial or two, Dorinda had yielded to the reluctance of the cow when her accustomed milker was changed. She had borrowed money again, "hiring money" they called it at Pedlar's Mill, to buy her first Jersey bull; but the daughters of that bull were still her best butter-making cows.