He hurried away, and came back with the answer that Mrs. Benbow would be out in a minute.
"Thank you," the young woman said quietly. Then she added: "You have hurt your arm, I see."
"Yes," he answered; "it is a great nuisance. I cannot write. I have been wondering whether I could get any one to write for me. Do you know of any one?"
"No," she said bitterly; "we don't write here. We make butter and cheese, and we fatten up our poultry, and then we go to market and sell our butter, cheese, and poultry."
"Well," said Hieronymus, "and why shouldn't you?"
He looked up at her, and saw what a discontented expression had come over her young face.
She took no notice of his interruption, but just switched the horse's ears with the end of her whip.
"That is what we do year after year," she continued, "until I suppose we have become so dull that we don't care to do anything else. That is what we have come into the world for: to make butter and cheese, and fatten up our poultry, and go to market."
"Yes," he answered cheerily, "and we all have to do it in some form or other. We all go to market to sell our goods, whether they be brains, or practical common-sense (which often, you know, has nothing to do with brains), or butter, or poultry. Now I don't know, of course, what you have in your basket; but supposing you have eggs, which you are taking to market. Well, you are precisely in the same condition as the poet who is on his way to a publisher's, carrying a new poem in his vest pocket. And yet there is a difference."
"Of course there is," she jerked out scornfully.