“You! I thought you were not buying horses.”
“You know what I mean. How much does old Flippance want to give?”
“Oh, he’s not so old,” she said evasively. She was scanning the horses with troubled eye, perturbed even more than by her own affairs by the thought of the innumerable diseases and defects and doctorings which might be lurking beneath their sheen of health and vigour. Her innocent faith undermined by literature and Mr. Flippance’s experience, she had a cynical sense of horsey hypocrisy, of whited, blacked, or browned sepulchres, within which fearsome worms burrowed in their millions. She would have gladly consulted Will, had he not been so tactlessly intrusive. Even as it was, she murmured encouragingly: “There doesn’t seem much choice to-day.” Indeed, the animals were mostly huge shire horses with their heavily feathered fetlocks. Of hackneys there were only two or three.
“I should take that Suffolk Punch,” advised Will, indicating a chestnut. “He’ll have the strength to draw the caravan, and doesn’t look so clumsy and hairy-legged as the others.”
“I like the star on his forehead,” said Jinny. “But I can’t bear a cropped tail, it’s cruel. Besides, Mr. Flippance hasn’t got a caravan.”
“Well, how does he carry all that truck I saw?”
“Oh, that goes in wagons with horses just hired from town to town. They don’t even live in a caravan like Mr. Duke’s got. No, but they have a trap that they drive over in, ahead, and then Mr. Flippance uses the trap to look for a pitch to hire, or to bring home naphtha for the lamps or timber for mending the theatre—something always goes wrong, he says.”
“Then I’d have the Cleveland?”
“Which is the Cleveland?”
“That tall bay with black points and clean legs. I’ve hardly ever seen one at an Essex fair, but they’re strong as plough-horses and handsome as hackneys.”