“Never—­never,” she swore to him.  “I hate every man on earth but you, dad.”

She closed his eyes and tied up his chin twenty years after, and when she reigned at Wych Elm, she found but one difficulty—­to get the rising generation of men to bide under her rule and carry on.

No.  IV

THE OLD SOLDIER

A woman may be just as big a fool at sour seventy as she was at sweet seventeen.  In fact, you can say about ’em, that a woman’s always a woman, so long as the breath bides in her body; and my sister, Mary, weren’t any exception to the rule.  You see, there was only us two, and when my parents died, I married, and took on Brownberry Farm and my sister, who shared and shared alike with me, took over our other farm, by the name of Little Sherberton, t’other side the Dart.  A very good farmer, too, she was—­knew as much as I did about things, by which I mean sheep and cattle; while she was still cleverer at crops, and I never rose oats like she did at Little Sherberton, nor lifted such heavy turnips as what she did.

Mary explained it very simply.

“You’m just so clever as me,” she said, “but you’m not so generous.  You ain’t got my powers of looking forward, and you hate to part with money in your pocket for the sake of money that’s to be there.  In a word, you’re narrow-minded, and don’t spend enough on manure, Rupert; and till you put it on thicker and ban’t feared of paying for lime, you’ll never get a root fit to put before a decent sheep.”

There was truth in it I do believe, for I was always a bit prone, like my father before me, to starve the land, against my reason.  You’d think that was absurd, and yet you’ll hardly find a man, even among the upper educated people, who haven’t got his little weak spots like that, and don’t do some things that he knows be silly, even while he’s doing ’em.  They cast him down at the moment; and he’ll even make resolves to be more open-handed, or more close-fisted, as the case may be, but the weakness lies in your nature, and you could no more cure me from being small-minded with my manure than you could have cured Mary from shivering to her spine every time she saw a single magpie, or spilled the salt.

A very impulsive woman, and yet, as you may say, a very keen and clever one in many respects.  I don’t think she ever wanted to marry and certainly I can call home no adventures in the way of courting that fell to her lot.  And yet a pleasant woman, though not comely.  In fact, without unkindness, she might have been called a terribly ugly woman.  Yellow as a guinea, with gingery hair, yellow eyes, and no figure to save her.  You would have thought her property might have drawn an adventurer or two, for Little Sherberton was a tenement farm and Mary’s very own; but nobody came along, or if they did, they only looked and passed by; and though Mary had no objection to men in general, she didn’t encourage them.  But in her case, without a doubt, they’d have needed all the encouragement she could give ’em, besides the property, to have a dash at her.