"Mayn't I even tease you?" Philip asked, in mock humility. "I don't mind being teased, but it isn't teasing. It's serious." "Your sense of humor plays you tricks sometimes," he said. "Oh, don't talk about my sense of humor like that. My sense of humor isn't a watch that you can take out and tap and regulate and wind up and shake your head over. I hate people who talk about a sense of humor as you do. Are you so sure you have one yourself?" "Perhaps I haven't," Philip agreed, but by the way in which he spoke Sylvia knew that he would maintain he had a sense of humor, and that the rest of humanity had none if it combined to contradict him. "I always distrust people who are too confidently the possessors of one," he added. "You don't understand in the least what I mean," Sylvia cried out, in exasperation. "You couldn't distrust anybody else's sense of humor if you had one yourself." "That's what I said," Philip pointed out, in an aggrieved voice. "Don't go on; you'll make me scream," she adjured him. "I won't talk about a sense of humor, because if there is such a thing it obviously can't be talked about." Lest Philip should pursue the argument, she left him and went for a long muddy walk by herself half-way to Galton. She had never before walked beyond the village of Medworth, but she was still in such a state of nervous exasperation that she continued down the hill beyond it without noticing how far it was taking her. The country on either side of the road ascended in uncultivated fields toward dense oak woods. In many of these fields were habitations with grandiose names, mostly built of corrugated iron. Sylvia thought at first that she was approaching the outskirts of Galton and pressed on to explore the town, the name of which was familiar from the rickety tradesmen's carts that jogged through Green Lanes. There was no sign of a town, however, and after walking about two miles through a landscape that recalled the pictures she had seen of primitive settlements in the Far West, she began to feel tired and turned round upon her tracks, wishing she had not come quite so far. Suddenly a rustic gate that was almost buried in the unclipped hazel hedge on one side of the road was flung open, and an elderly lady with a hooked nose and fierce bright eyes, dressed in what looked at a first glance like a pair of soiled lace window-curtains, asked Sylvia with some abruptness if she had met a turkey going in her direction. Sylvia shook her head, and the elderly lady (Sylvia would have called her an old lady from her wrinkled countenance, had she not been so astonishingly vivacious in her movements) called in a high harsh voice: "Emmie! There's a girl here coming from Galton way, and _she_ hasn't seen Major Kettlewell." In the distance a female voice answered, shrilly, "Perhaps he's crossed over to the Pluepotts'!"