"Then do you mind," Tietjens said, "telling me if you know this road at all?"
"Not a bit!" she answered cheerfully. "I never drove it in my life. I looked it up on the map before we started because I'm sick to death of the road we went by. There's a one-horse 'bus from Rye to Tenterden, and I've walked from Tenterden to my uncle's over and over again. . . ."
"We shall probably be out all night then," Tietjens said. "Do you mind? The horse may be tired. . . ."
She said:
"Oh, the poor horse! . . . I meant us to be out all night. . . . But the poor horse. . . . What a brute I was not to think of it."
"We're thirteen miles from a place called Brede; eleven and a quarter from a place whose name I couldn't read; six and three-quarters from somewhere called something like Uddlemere. . . ." Tietjens said. "This is the road to Uddlemere."
"Oh, that was Grandfather's Wantways all right," she declared. "I know it well. It's called 'Grandfather's' because an old gentleman used to sit there called Gran'fer Finn. Every Tenterden market day he used to sell fleed cakes from a basket to the carts that went by. Tenterden market was abolished in 1845—the effect of the repeal of the Corn Laws, you know. As a Tory you ought to be interested in that."
Tietjens sat patiently: He could sympathise with her mood; she had now a heavy weight off her chest; and, if long acquaintance with his wife had not made him able to put up with feminine vagaries, nothing ever would.
"Would you mind," he said then, "telling me . . ."
"If," she interrupted, "that was really Gran'fer Wantways: midland English. 'Vent' equals four cross-roads: high French carrefour. . . . Or, perhaps, that isn't the right word. But it's the way your mind works. . . ."