"Oh. What do you do there? What are you, by the way?" Daphne looked up at her companion with bird-like inquisitiveness. She moved in a society familiar with the age, ancestry, profession, wardrobe, ailments, love affairs, and income of every one within a radius of five miles. Consequently she considered a new acquaintanceship incomplete in the last degree until she had acquired sufficient information on the subject in hand to supply, say, a tolerably intimate obituary notice.
"I suppose you are something," she continued. "I hope so, anyhow. An idle man is always so mopy."
"What would you put me down as?" asked Apollyon.
Daphne scrutinised him without fear or embarrassment.
"I'm not much of a judge," she said. "You see, we don't come across many men here, and we are so poor that we don't get away much."
"Don't you go up to London occasionally, to buy a new frock?" said Sir John, covertly regarding the trim figure by his side.
"Me—London? Not much. Dad has a lot of grand relations there, but I don't think he bothered much about them, or they about him, after he married. He was too much wrapped up in mother. So we never hear anything of them now. No, I have hardly ever been away from Snayling, and I'm a great deal too busy here to worry about London or any other such place. So I don't know much about men," she concluded simply—"except my own, of course."
"Your own?"
"Yes—Dad and the boys. And then I know all about the sort of man one meets round here. I can tell a ditcher from a ploughman; and if I meet a man in a dog-cart with cases at the back I know he's a commercial traveller, and if he has a red face I know he's a farmer, and if he hasn't I know he's a doctor; but I haven't had much other experience."
"Still, what am I?" reiterated Apollyon.