"It's all very well for you to talk, Arthur Alce, for you think no one can run Ansdore except yourself who'll never get the chance. It's well known around, in spite of what you say, that Socknersh is valiant with sheep--no one can handle 'em as he can; at the shearing Harmer and his men were full of it--how the ewes ud keep quiet for him as for nobody else--and 'twas the same at the lambing. It wasn't his fault that the lambs died, but because that chap at Northampton never told us what he should ought.... I tell you, I've never had anyone like him for handling sheep--they're quite different with him from what they were with that rude old Fuller, barking after 'em like a dog along the Brodnyx road and bringing 'em up to Rye all raggled and draggled and dusty as mops ... he knows how to manage sheep--he's like one of themselves." "That's just about it--he's like another sheep, so they ain't scared of him, but he can do no more for 'em than another sheep could, neither. He's ignorant--he's got no sense nor know, or he'd never have let you breed with them Spanishes, or given 'em a poisonous double-dip--and he's always having sway-backs up at market, too, and tic and hoose and fluke.... Oh, Joanna, if you're any bit wise you'll get shut of him before he messes you all up. And you know what folks say--they say you'd have got shut of him months agone if you hadn't been so unaccountable set on him, so as they say--yes, they say one day you'll marry him and make him master of Ansdore." Alce's face flamed as red as his whiskers and nearly as red as Joanna's cheeks. For a moment she faced him speechless, her mouth open. "Oh, that's what they say, is it!" she broke out at last. "They say I'd marry Dick Socknersh, who looks after my sheep, and who's like a sheep himself. They think I'd marry a man who's got no more'n two words on his tongue and half that number of ideas in his head--who can't think without its giving him a headache--who comes of no class of people--his father and mother were hedge people up at Anvil Green--who gets eighteen bob a week as my looker--who--" "Don't get so vrothered, Joanna. I'm only telling you what folk say, and if you'll stop and think you'll see they've got some reason. Your looker's done things that no farmer on this Marsh ud put up with a month, and yet you keep him on, you with all your fine ideas about farming and running Ansdore as your poor father ud have had it ... and then he's a well set-up young man too, nice-looking and stout as I won't deny, and you're a young woman that I'd say was nice-looking too, and it's only natural folks should talk when they see a pretty woman hanging on to a handsome chap in spite of his having half bust her."