“What’s the girl like?” he asked.
She sniffed. “As bold as yer mind to! Sech airs! I never did see!”
“You send my sister in to me!” he ordered. “You’re nothing but a doddering old idiot, Martha!”
She grinned. “Iss, sure, but I was a fine woman in my day, Maister!”
“You were that,” he agreed.
“When I was in my twenty,” she nodded. “That Loveday warn’t nothing to me, but I never took and thought to marry above my station, as well you knaw, my dear! I don’t knaw where the world’s a-going!”
“Get out of this, you old wind-bag, and send my sister to me!” he said impatiently.
She went off, chuckling to herself; and some minutes later Clara came into the room, with her hands grimed with earth-mould, a trowel in one of them, and a fern in the other. She left a clod of mud from one of her shoes on the carpet, and had evidently caught her heel in the hem of her skirt again, since it sagged unevenly and showed a frayed edge.
“You’re a sight, Clara,” Penhallow told her frankly. “What’s that miserable thing you’ve got hold of?”
“Nothin’ much. One of the film-ferns,” she replied. “You wouldn’t know.”