“Perhaps it was selfish,” she answered, “but I am afraid I rather encouraged father. It seems to me mean, making your living out of work that does no good to anyone. I hate the bargaining, but the farming itself I love. Of course, it means having only one evening dress a year and making that myself. But even when I had a lot I always preferred wearing the one that I thought suited me the best. As for the children, they are as healthy as young savages, and everything they want to make them happy is just outside the door. The boys won’t go to college; but seeing they will have to earn their own living, that, perhaps, is just as well. It is mother, poor dear, that worries so.” She laughed again. “Her favourite walk is to the workhouse. She came back quite excited the other day because she had heard the Guardians intend to try the experiment of building separate houses for old married couples. She is convinced she and father are going to end their days there.” “You, as the business partner,” I asked her, “are hopeful that the farm will pay?” “Oh, yes,” she answered, “it will pay all right—it does pay, for the matter of that. We live on it and live comfortably. But, of course, I can see mother’s point of view, with seven young children to bring up. And it is not only that.” She stopped herself abruptly. “Oh, well,” she continued with a laugh, “you have got to know us. Father is trying. He loves experiments, and a woman hates experiments. Last year it was bare feet. I daresay it is healthier. But children who have been about in bare feet all the morning—well, it isn’t pleasant when they sit down to lunch; I don’t care what you say. You can’t be always washing. He is so unpractical. He was quite angry with mother and myself because we wouldn’t. And a man in bare feet looks so ridiculous. This summer it is short hair and no hats; and Sally had such pretty hair. Next year it will be sabots or turbans—something or other suggesting the idea that we’ve lately escaped from a fair. On Mondays and Thursdays we talk French. We have got a French nurse; and those are the only days in the week on which she doesn’t understand a word that’s said to her. We can none of us understand father, and that makes him furious. He won’t say it in English; he makes a note of it, meaning to tell us on Tuesday or Friday, and then, of course, he forgets, and wonders why we haven’t done it. He’s the dearest fellow alive. When I think of him as a big boy, then he is charming, and if he really were only a big boy there are times when I would shake him and feel better for it.” She laughed again. I wanted her to go on talking, because her laugh was so delightful. But we had reached the road, and she said she must go back: there were so many things she had to do. “We have not settled about Dick,” I reminded her. “Mother took rather a liking to him,” she murmured.