‘Where’s Hen to pour the water for you?’ she asked.

‘I squirt the water outen my mouth sometimes, when I’ve got nobody to pour,’ he said.

She offered to pour the water this time. ‘I got little to do for a spell now. As well as not pour the water, I might.’

‘Your advice about the Neal place was prime good advice, as it turned out,’ he said, speaking softly as if continuing a confidence. ‘I got my hands full as ’tis.’

‘I don’t set up to be a first-rate trafficker. I only guessed it, seems like.’

‘You are a first rate guesser, Miss Ellen, you are. Prime.’

She poured the water when he called for it, a little at a time. Jasper was carrying the meal across the yard and busying himself about the house door. He would wash himself in the kitchen, as he always did on Saturday, surly and indifferent, or jocularly indifferent, and then he would go away across the field to join Clark at the river. ‘I don’t countenance Hester’s way,’ Marthy had said the day before. ‘Hester, she don’t get but blame from me, now. If I had my way she’d go off afore sunset and take all her duds along to stay gone a spell.’ Marthy had said this to offer consolation and to shed all blame from herself.

‘That’s a pretty dress you got,’ Phillips said. ‘I noticed it one day when you came up the field. I saw you make it yourself, too, one day when you sewed, a-sitten on the bench all day. You are a master hand to make things, I see that long ago.’

‘I don’t set up as a prime trafficker in no way nor how,’ she said, but she was pleased at the praise of her skill.

‘I wish there was another one just like you, exactly like, you understand.’

‘She’d be a right smart way off from perfect, now.’

‘Exactly like and free, you understand.’

‘I don’t set up in no way to be perfect and I expect I aggravate a body a good deal.’

‘If ever you need, you understand, you just let me know, just send. If ever you want a friend or any help. As I just said I wish there was another just like you, exactly like, and don’t you forget what I say.’

‘You’d be tormented plumb outen your life inside a week,’ she said, beginning to laugh. Jasper was coming out of the house door, dressed now in the clean work clothes he would wear the next week. She talked brightly, laughing, wanting Jasper to see as he walked across the yard. ‘A stone that turns by a treadle, that would be the way to have it. Then a man would have a free hand to pour the water. Turns like a spinnen wheel.’

‘I had my eyes on you a right smart while,’ he said, whispering, ‘and I know you don’t laugh at a man that’s in earnest like I am.’