"No?" said I, eager at heart to knock him off his perch.
"Nor men," he added, leering at Margaret.
"Come along, Sal," said I to her laughingly, "before the good gentleman
jots you down a Jacobite."
So we left him, and when, fifty paces down the road, I looked back at
him, he was jotting in his notebook again.
"I think he knows something about us," said I.
"Very likely," she replied calmly. "I've seen him once before in London,
talking to Major Tixall. Who could forget a face like that?"
"He's uglier than the big-mouthed dragoon."
"The dragoon was at any rate a soldier."
"And the worst of soldiers has, no doubt, some savour of grace in him."
"Quite so," she retorted. "His calling makes it necessary."
"And, so reasoning, you would say, I suppose, that the best of farmers
was to seek in the higher reaches of manliness."
"Have I not told you, Master Oliver, that between man's logic and woman's
logic there's a great gulf fixed?"
"Minds are minds," said I.
"And hearts are hearts," replied she, and so shut me up to my thinking
again.
We turned into a cart-track on our left leading in the direction of
Eccleshall.
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