So then Martha put a hand to each of her milking-pails. “I’d best be getting on with my work. If you’re likening me to a sow——”
“There, there! It wasn’t you lass; it was women not just so bonnie—the most part o’ women, I mean.”
Martha lingered. The deft flattery had pleased her, and she was willing to surrender any casual defence of her own sex. “Well, the most part o’ women, Simon, they’re feather-witted maybe. I’ll own as much.”
“And like sows,” went on the other, with patient explanation of his theme. “A man chooses his straight road and sticks to it, but a sow, when you want to get her Lunnon way, why, you’ve just to twist her by the tail, backward foremost, and pretend you want her to head straight for Scotland.”
They eyed each other with a large, impassive silence. There was plenty of leisure these days at Windyhough, too much of it; and Simon found it pleasant to watch Martha’s wholesome, wind-sweet face, to hear the voice that seemed made for singing to the kine while she sat at the milking-pail. And Martha, for her part, had never known a wooing, and the prime hunger of her life still went unsatisfied.
“Human nature—it’s a queer matter,” said Simon by and by.
“And there’s a deal of it about,” sighed Martha. “Human nature—soon as ever a body can get away from moil and toil and begin to think, like—why, it’s just made up o’ things we haven’t got, Simon. And if we’d got them we shouldn’t care so much for ’em, and so it’s all a round o’ foolishness, like a donkey treading at the mill-wheel.”
A tear fell down on to Martha’s hand, and, because the grief was come by honestly, Simon felt an odd impulse stirring him. “Martha, my lass, I wish I was a good twenty years younger. If I were forty, now, and you——”
“I’m nearing forty, Simon. We’ll not talk of ages, by your leave.”
Simon walked up and down the yard, in a mood that was half between panic and something worthier. Then he came to Martha’s side. “I’ve a mind to kiss you,” he said.