Tom stirred up the mother sow with his walking-stick, and sniggered in a most feeble-minded fashion.
"How? Why not?" I demanded. "Do you mean to say you have not the power to influence him? Do you think that Harry, if properly advised, would persist in taking his own way in spite of us? I refuse to believe that any son of mine could do such a thing."
Again Tom laughed, looking at me as if he saw some great joke somewhere. I asked him what it was, and he said, "Oh, never mind—nothing." But I knew. He was thinking of my own elopement, to which I was driven by my father's second marriage—an incident that had no bearing whatever upon the present case. It exasperated me to see him so flippant about a matter of really grave importance, but I determined not to let him draw me into a dispute.
"Four years," I said mildly, "would give them time to know each other and their own minds. It would be a test, to prove them. If at the end of four years they were still faithful, I should feel assured that all was well. But of course they would get tired of each other long before that, and so he would be spared a terrible fate, and all the trouble would be at an end."
We had left the pigsty and were pacing the paths of the kitchen garden, surveying the depredations of the irrepressible slug.
"The rain seems to wash the soot away as fast as I put it on," sighed Tom. "I'll get a bag of lime, and try what that'll do. Well, Polly, for my part, I should be very sorry to think them likely to get tired of each other. And I don't believe it, either. I don't think she's that sort of a girl somehow."
"How like a man!" I ejaculated. "Just because she's got a pretty face!"
"No, not because she's got a pretty face—though it is a pretty face—but because she's good as well as pretty. She's a right down good girl, my dear, believe me—just the sort of daughter-in-law I'd have chosen for myself, if I had had the choosing. I told Harry so. You should have seen how pleased he was!"
"No doubt. But I don't see how you can know whether she's good or not. You are not always with her, as we are."
"Oh, I see her at times. We have little talks occasionally. A man can soon tell." He put his arm round my waist as we paced along. "I haven't been married to you for all these years without knowing a good woman from a bad one, Polly."