“That’s a fact. You are beginning to wake me up, Miss Wadhurst. I wish I wasn’t so lazy. But that market garden scheme—Dunning says the chap had been reading up a lot of stuff that was written about the French system, and that turned his head.”
“It turned his head—yes, it turned it in the right direction, Mr. Wingfield; that farm would make a fortune for any one setting to work it solely for market produce.”
“God bless my soul!” Jack Wingfield stopped dead when Priscilla had spoken—they had gone beyond the green limits of the furthest of the nets and were walking under the group of trees that had been allowed to remain standing when the ground had been deforested in order to make the tennis courts. “God bless my soul!” he repeated, in quite a reverent voice, which he assumed to counteract the suggested levity of his first utterance of the exclamation.
“Have I startled you?” she asked. “I meant to startle you. I used every art that I could think of to startle you. I should be horribly disappointed if you had remained unmoved.”
“Unmoved,” he said, in a slow way, moving from one syllable to the other. “Unmoved. I say, there’s a seat in a reasonable place under those trees. Let us make for it. I want to hear more.”
“I can’t quite see that you are justified in practically leaving the courts when you may be called on at any moment to play your game.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter; I’ve got no chance of anything. The people here are too good for me. I don’t bother myself working up my game until the week before.”
“You never will do anything in the world on that principle.”
“I don’t suppose I shall; but what’s the odds? You can’t turn out a Derby winner if you have only a humdrum roadster to go upon.”
“And you are content to live the life of a humdrum roadster?”