“Test it—analyse it; so that at a moment’s notice you can say what it is.”
“It’s never anything but milk, is it—before it’s wheeled off to the railway stations and sent up to the retailers who mix it with things—water and boracic acid?”
“That’s the haphazard way in which a dairy was run until recently. My father used actually to run his on the same want of principle. It was I who got the laboratory built, and now he works it on a proper system. We got rid of over fifty cows in a fortnight—some of them were believed by the dairy manager to be the best on the farm. It was only after a number of tests that I found out that their milk contained only the most miserable proportion of the true component parts of good milk.”
“And was it worth your while, may I ask?”
She looked at him in surprise.
“Worth our while? Why, the milk question is the most important that exists in England or anywhere else at the present moment. It is not going too far to say that the whole future of England depends upon the milk consumed by the people. Milk is the most marvellous thing in the world. It seems to me that it should be given a place in Nature all to itself. There is nothing so marvellous as milk, believe me.”
“It’s not so popular as beer in most localities. But now that I come to think of it, I fancy that you are right about it. It certainly is worth your while keeping your eye on it.”
“Oh, everything is worth one’s while if one does it properly.”
“Everything—except farming, it would appear. Dunning, my agent, has a very bad account to give of our farms—three of them without tenants—the largest has had no tenant for over three years. That’s not encouraging.”
“What are you going to do?”