The vast proportions of the barn--the biggest and oldest for many miles round--were a fitting background for Jethro with his muscular frame and fair, sun-seared face. He was so English, so brown, so spare. There was nothing of the student’s pallor and stoop about him--no irritating subtlety. There was no furrow in his face, no ridge of superfluous flesh, no mark of painful thought. It was all tough muscle. Pamela looked at him admiringly, her desire going out to strength and health and simplicity of life and motive. The clean shocks of yellow straw in the barn, the dirty, trodden straw in the yard, agreed well with his blue checked shirt and tan waistcoat; with his voluminous checked tie, made in the time-honored rustic fashion. His father had worn such ties and _his_ father before him. What had been seemly in “Old Jethro” was seemly in “Young Jethro”; that was the spirit of Folly Corner. It was a blue check tie made out of half a silk handkerchief, cut cornerwise and deftly folded into proper shape by the iron. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow, showing his delicately textured upper arm. He had been helping his men with some necessary job--he was a master, by heredity, of all the intricate sublime art of agriculture. She said: “We are going now. I wish you could come too.” As she spoke, a loud angry hiss came from behind the house. It was like the threatening bubble of a pot that is boiling too fast. “Chalcraft is taking a starling’s nest,” Jethro said. “Tell Aunt Sophy I may be up after tea.” He turned into the barn, through the dim shadow of which she could see two men, Peter Hone and another. She turned to go back through the yard, placing the points of her shoes carefully on the ground so that she might not soil above the toe-cap. Edred was leaning over the white paling and watching her gingerly progress with amusement. “Beastly dirty place, isn’t it?” he said, sneering and glancing down at the trodden straw. “I say, what a jolly dance you could have in that great barn! Do you remember the dance I took you to at Westminster Town Hall?” She nodded, hardly glancing at his slim, foppish figure. He was tinsel compared to Jethro--Jethro with his muscular arms bared amid the golden straw of his barn. She saw poetry in the vast gray place, with its dusty, murky rafters; to Edred it only suggested a subscription dance and Westminster Town Hall. For the moment she preferred Jethro, with his white strong throat.