"He'll be all right," said Martin, "he likes Joanna Godden really."
"So do I. She sounds a good sort. Will you take me to see her before I go?"
"Certainly. I want you to meet her. When you do you'll see that I'm not doing anything rash, even from the worldly point of view. She comes of fine old yeoman stock, and she's of far more consequence on the Marsh than any of us."
"I can't see that the social question is of much importance. As long as your tastes and your ideas aren't too different ..."
"I'm afraid they are, rather. But somehow we seem to complement each other. She's so solid and so sane—there's something barbaric about her too ... it's queer."
"I've seen her. She's a fine-looking girl—a bit older than you, isn't she?"
"Five years. Against it, of course—but then I'm so much older than she is in most ways. She's a practical woman of business—knows more about farming than I shall ever know in my life—but in matters of life and love, she's a child ..."
"I should almost have thought it better the other way round—that you should know about the business and she about the love. But then in such matters I too am a child."
He smiled disarmingly, but Martin felt ruffled—partly because his brother's voluntary abstention from experience always annoyed him, and partly because he knew that in this case the child was right and the man wrong.