“I think there is nothing to it,” said Phuti. “As long as everything is straight. You have to get things level, and not like this.” He made an up-and-down movement with his hands. “If you do that, then the house will be a good one.”

Mma Makutsi nodded. That sounded perfectly reasonable to her. She could hardly believe her good fortune: to be standing here with her husband, her real, legal husband, surveying a small square of Botswana soil that actually belonged to them. To own earth was a great and awe-inspiring thing; to be able to run through one’s hands the very soil that was yours and nobody else’s; that you could stand upon not under sufferance, but as of right; land that you could turn to your own purpose and plant with your own crops, or allow your own cattle to graze—not that they were planning to run cattle in the garden, but if by some whim they chose to do so, then they could. Such things, such freedoms, such privileges were grave things, and might turn the head, unless you were careful to remind yourself of who you were—Grace Makutsi, from Bobonong, daughter of a very humble man and woman who never had much more than a few goats and scrawny cattle, but who had nursed hopes for their children and had encouraged them to make the best of their lives. She had done that, of course, and through hard work and the inspiration provided by a particular teacher, a slight man with spectacles who rode to school each day on an ancient black bicycle and who believed with all his heart in the power of education, she had somehow got herself to Gaborone and become a trained secretary. That powerful word, secretary—she was so proud of it; she rolled it about her mouth and uttered it as one might pronounce a shibboleth: secretary, secretary. That would have been enough, she now thought; to have achieved that would have been sufficient, but she had gone further and become an assistant detective, and then an associate detective, which was where she now was. What heights lay beyond? She had not really thought about it, but now, as she surveyed the plot with Phuti Radiphuti, it suddenly occurred to her that she should become a principal detective, if not a chief detective. No, that last description was perhaps going too far; Mma Ramotswe was a chief detective, she assumed, and no matter what improvements there might be in her own status, it was definitely not appropriate for her to claim equality in that field with Mma Ramotswe. That would be … it would be pushy: yes, there was only one word for it—pushy.