"Old scoundrel! I'll talk to him severely. I've had a rod in pickle ever since last year."
Dennis laughed suddenly, but his sister was in no laughing mood.
"I really can't see the funny side," she declared.
"Of course not. There is none. He's a fraud; but I remembered what Travers said last year—you recollect? The thrips and bug and all sorts of things got into the vines, and we asked Travers what was the matter, and he explained what a shameful muddle Voysey had made. Then, when Joe had gone chattering off, saying the grapes were worth five shillings a pound in open market, and that they'd only lost their bloom because we kept fingering them, Travers said he looked as if he was infested with thrips and mealy bug himself. I shall always laugh when I think of that—it was so jolly true."
"I hate a man who never owns that he is wrong; and I do wish you'd get rid of him. It's only fair to me. I have but few pleasures, and the garden is one of them. He tramples and tears, and if you venture to ask him to tidy—well, you know what happens. The next morning the garden looks as though there had been a plague of locusts in it—everything has gone."
"He ought to retire; but he's saved nothing worth mentioning, poor old fool!"
"That's his affair."
"It ought to be; but you know well enough that improvidence all round is my affair. We are faced with it everywhere. Head has just been in here. There's a rumour about the poor people that the innkeeper swindled. He took their savings, and there's nobody to pay them back now he's gone. But it seems that here and there those hit hardest—mostly women—have had their money again. Not your work, I hope, Alice? But I know what you do with your cash. Voysey was talking about it a little time ago, and I blamed him for not having saved some money himself by this time. He said, 'Better spend what you earn on yourself than give it to somebody else to save for you.' The misfortunes of the people seemed to have pleased him a good deal. 'We'm mostly in the same box now,' he said; 'but I had the rare sense to spend my brass myself. I've had the value of it in beer and tobacco, if no other way.'"
"Detestable old man! And Gollop's no better. Anybody but you would have got rid of them both years and years ago."
"They must retire soon—they simply must. They're the two eldest men in the parish."