"Don't be silly. There are lots better. What I do, I do for pleasure."
"Ay, but it's a kind o' pleasure that takes it out of you more than you let on. What's happened to roses that used to be in your cheeks, eh? You've been fretting yourself because Mr. Coast wouldn't let you have Jack Greenwood for shepherd lad, ay. Mrs. Greenwood told me all about yon business. And how ye'd got him away now and all. 'Of all fond fools,' ah said, 'yon schoolmaster chap takes a lot o' beating.' As I said to Mrs. Greenwood, 'Eddication's all very well,' ah says, 'but it doesn't teach you to drive a waggon let alone a plough!'"
Mary sighed. So every one knew about Jack Greenwood too. Every one knew about everything. The fierce light that beats upon a throne is only a candle's flicker beside the searching glare of village criticism. It consoled her, though, to think that publicity could only further reveal her love for Anderby. And it was pleasant to sit in the dancing firelight, while the dusk crept up the orchard outside, and listen to Mrs. Watts telling her how wonderful she was.
Mrs. Watts knew that Mary found it pleasant. Mrs. Robson, she considered, was a very fine young woman, but as she talked a thousand past acts of kindness, of gratuitous attention, of charitable patronage rose before her. Somehow by her crude flattery she seemed paying a little of her debt back to the mistress of the Wold Farm, and holding over her, if only for a moment, that suzerainty which belongs to people who can give us what we need.
An hour later, when Mary opened the front door and entered her lamplit hall, she recalled with a faint sensation of disgust her calm acceptance of the old woman's praise. But after all if people liked her why shouldn't they say so? And if they spoke why shouldn't she listen? "It isn't as if it was likely to turn my head," she thought as she drew the curtains across the dining-room windows. "I'm not a little fool to be taken in by that sort of thing."
She really thought she wasn't.
At the same time she was glad that John had to attend a vestry meeting that evening, for she had suddenly remembered the orange-covered book. Mr. David Rossitur's acid comments on capitalist farmers were likely to prove an effective antidote to the cloying sweetness of Mrs. Watts's adulation.
She produced the book from a drawer and sat down in John's arm-chair before the fire.
At first, she read with knit brows; then her eyes opened wide; then she sat up straight in the arm-chair, her lips parted in a half-amused, half-incredulous smile. It really was an outrageous book! Mary was unacquainted with any political or social theories more violent than those expounded in the columns of the Yorkshire Chronicle. The only excuse for this tirade against capitalism, patronage and "the dependence of the proletariat upon the self-interested solicitude of a bourgeois minority," lay in the youth of its author. Of course he must be a mere boy—a student at Oxford, according to the preface. And they were always very young, Mary was sure. A footnote explained that the writer had spent one summer vacation on a walking tour, investigating the conditions in which agricultural labourers of the South Country lived and worked. It added that he hoped to continue his researches in the North at an early date, for the conclusions he had reached after his Southern pilgrimage had convinced him that the only hope for England lay in social revolution. Anything less drastic—the extension of trades unionism, or the political ascendancy of the Labour Party—was merely a sop thrown to the proletarian Cerberus.
"He's very fond of that word 'proletarian'" thought Mary. She was not absolutely certain what it meant.