Page:Temple Bailey--The Gay cockade.djvu/366

 spend the precious years ahead of you in the company of cows?"

"There'll be pigs too, Winifred; and chickens. And, of course, my horses."

"You belong in a world of men. It's the secret of your success that men like you."

"My cows like me—and there's great comfort after the stress of a stormy session in the reposefulness of a pig."

"I wish you'd be serious."

"I am serious. Perhaps it's a throwback, Winifred. There is farmer blood in my veins."

It was something deeper than that. It was his virile joy in fundamentals. He loved his golden-eared Guernseys and his black Berkshires and his White Wyandottes—not because of their choiceness but because they were cows and pigs and chickens; and he kept a pair of pussy cats, half a dozen dogs, and as many horses, because man primitively had made friends of the dumb brutes upon whom the ease and safety of his life depended.

There was, rather strangely, something about Anne which fitted in with this atavistic idea. She was, more than Winifred, a hearthstone woman. A man might carry her over his threshold and find her when he came home o' nights. It was hard to visualize Winifred as waiting or watching or welcoming. She was always going somewhere with an 360