“You wouldn’t really mind?”
“All’s grist that comes to the mill. Besides, it would leave me free to branch out to Totfield Major, and perhaps even Colchester. Tuesdays, say, if you like.”
But she did not like. Her conception of a wife’s dignity boggled at the notion of driving around as before. Unmaidenly it was not—he had handsomely admitted it—but unwifely it assuredly was. A wife’s place, she felt instinctively, was the home. She shook her head. “I don’t think I ought to drive Methusalem any more.”
He gasped. “Well, you wouldn’t expect to handle a pair of horses, would you?”
If he meant she could not, Jinny was not so sure. But why argue so irrelevant a point? “No, of course not,” she murmured obediently. “I mean Methusalem will like going out to grass.”
He breathed freely again. The path to his project was clear at last. “But as a sort of guard now——” he ventured, With an indulgent air.
Jinny beamed at so facetious a picture. She saw herself in red, with big buttons and shorn hair. “So I’m to blow your horn for you after all!”
“Sure—once you’ve paid up the gloves!”
She laughed merrily. Even Miss Gentry’s bill was a dissipated nightmare now.
“But where shall I get the money?” she joked, for the pleasure of his reply.