Mr. George couldn't quite see it. Yet it tickled his paternal male conceit of authority, so he didn't contradict her. And Jack smiled to himself. "She runs too much to talk," he thought. "She runs too much in her head." She seemed, indeed, to have forgotten quite how he kissed her. It seemed that "questions of the day" quite absorbed her.
They came through the trees in the soft afternoon sunshine. Jack remembered the place well. He remembered the Jamboree, and that girl who had called him Dearie! His first woman! And insignificant enough; but not bad. He thought kindly of her. She was a warm-hearted soul. But she didn't belong to his life at all. He remembered too how he had kicked Tom. The faithful Tom! Mary would never marry Tom, that was a certainty. And it was equally certain, Tom would never break his heart.
Jack was thinking to himself that he would build a new house on this place, and ask Mary to live in the old house. That was a brilliant idea.
But as he drove up, he thought: "The first money you spend on this place, my boy, will be on a brand new five-barred white gate."
Emma and Amos came out full of joy. They too were a faithful old pair. Jack handed Mary down. She wore a dark-blue dress and white silk gloves. It was so like her, to put on white silk gloves. But he liked the touch of them, as he handed her down. Her small, short, rather passive hands.
He and she walked round the place, and she was very much interested. A new place, a new farm, a new undertaking always excited her, as if it was she who was making the new move.
"Don't you think that will be a good place for the new house," he was saying to her. "Down there, near that jolly bunch of old trees. And the garden south of the trees. If you dig in that flat you'll find water, sure to."
She inspected the place most carefully, and uttered her mature judgments.
"You'll have to help think it out," he said. "Monica's as different as an opossum. Would you like to build yourself a house here, and tend to things? I'll build you one if you like. Or give you the old one."
She looked at him with glowing eyes.