For, after he had most affectionately embraced her, so affectionately that she was sure one of her tendons had snapped, he had said: ‘No good his trying to milk me, you know.’
Milk him?
She lay staring into the dark. Was character, after all, better than education?
§
The Canon said it was, and so did his wife. In fact at tea next day in Mrs. Luke’s little garden, on that bit of lawn round the cedar, near the low fence across which grazed Mr. Thorpe’s Jersey cows, they all three were unanimous that it was. Wonderful how daylight, ordinary things, meals, tea-cups, callers, dispelled doubts.
‘Better to have both, of course,’ said the Canon, eating Mr. Thorpe’s forced strawberries after covering them with the cream that had been, twenty-four hours earlier, inside those very cows, ‘but if that’s not possible, give me character. It’s what tells. It’s the only thing that in the long run tells.’
‘Oh, well—one isn’t seriously disputing it,’ said Mrs. Luke. ‘Only these theories, if one presses them——’
She paused, and poured out more tea for Mrs. Walker.
‘For instance,’ she went on, ‘suppose a man had a cook of a completely admirable nature. If he married her, could he be happy? I mean, an educated man. Let us say a very well educated man.’
‘Certainly, if she cooked nicely,’ said the Canon, who thought he scented rather than saw the form of Mr. Thorpe lurking somewhere at the back of his delightful parishioner’s remarks, and wasn’t going to be caught.