“That’s it. If she kept away . . .! Then she might notice. She has smelt these smells for thirty years. She says that a smell you can smell is not dangerous. Brian thinks just as she does.”
“France may take some dust out of his eyes.”
Retrenchment, expenses cut to the irreducible Saltaire minimum, was inscribed upon gates, fences, and buildings. Cicely had an illuminating word to say about the gates:
“Father said that he liked a gate that you could put a young horse at without running much risk of breaking your neck.”
“What a humane man!”
Cicely added pensively:
“When hounds run across Wilverley I look before I leap.”
“Ah! Then you do see the difference between Wilverley and Upworthy?”
Reluctantly, feeling rather disloyal, Cicely had to confess that the difference did obtrude itself. Since Arthur’s return, she had ridden out with him about once a week. A groom accompanied them. Arthur would dismount and take Cicely into his cottages, asking many questions, insisting upon truthful answers, checking, so to speak, the reports, written and spoken, of his agent, leaving nothing to chance or mischance. His actions as a landlord revealed him far more clearly to Cicely than the halting words with which at first he had tried to capture her affections. She began to wonder what Upworthy would look like under Wilverley management. If she married this good, capable fellow, would he put his stout shoulder to the wheel of a mother-in-law? Tentatively, with a faint flush upon her cheeks, she said to him:
“I wish, Arthur, that you could persuade Mother to make a few improvements at Upworthy.”