She was probably quite as strong as Mary, and might go off at a touch. The most sensible thing to do—the only thing to do—was to make conversation, and so give her time to settle down in her conviction, if he could not lull her out of it. The conversation must be on some calm, uncontroversial subject, and the less part she took in it, the better. It should, in fact, be a monologue. During the years while he was falling out of practice with women, he had become versed in the technique of lecturing. He lectured on literature, but that would be a dangerous subject just now, so he would lecture on bulls.

That bull at Spixworth, he said—opening with that proved device, a concession to superficial judgments—might not be a good specimen; it might be quite a poor one, but nevertheless he felt he should go and look at it. In the matter of long-term selective breeding, a positive deficiency could always (provided that the deficient beast was pure bred) be made the means of adjusting a better balance in a future animal. These corrective adjustments are best made through the sire, for a defect or a particular excellence in a cow can become quite uncontrollable in that cow’s progeny, and therefore he always preferred to work with a cow who was no more than a first-class typical specimen, relying on his choice of the bull to develop and stabilize the traits he had in mind. But it was unlikely that the bull at Spixworth would turn out to be the bull he wanted, for he had reached a stage where he was, so to 59speak, working to a hair’s-breadth of excellence, and it would be nothing out of the way for him to inspect and reject a hundred animals before he could be satisfied. Feed, too, should be dealt with in the same spirit of rigorous selection, and he really had no patience with people who supposed you could build up a first-rate herd on a third-rate soil. At Burton St Laurence, he was fortunate in having a fair amount—say, three hundred acres—of almost faultless pasture, and by keeping a few hives of bees he had much improved his clover hay. Even so, he now bought hay from Berkshire. He had met Charles Tufton at the Bath and West Show in 1950—Tufton was a man whose ideas were usually worth attending to—and Tufton had asked him why Latona, a heifer that Tufton had been much struck by when he visited Burton St Laurence earlier in the season, was not being shown. He had explained that Latona had been kept back because of her eyelashes—there are few things more disembellishing to a cow than scanty, irregular eyelash growth—and Tufton had said at once, ‘Give her upland hay,’ and recommended a man on the Berkshire downs. He had followed Tufton’s advice, and Latona’s eyelashes soon became all he could wish. There was certainly something in upland hay. Tufton was an enthusiast for artificial insemination, but there Charlton could not see eye to eye with him. Undeniably, it might raise the general standard, but to raise a general standard was also, in a sense, to lower it. Tufton, too, had at one time a leaning toward electric fencing, but afterwards recanted. For himself, he had kept Burton St Laurence a 60hedged farm; though it had been necessary to grub up all the original hedges, he had immediately replanted them. Few things afforded him greater pleasure than to stand on some spring morning admiring the sharp green leaves and the masses of white blossom on a hawthorn hedge while hearing his beasts contentedly grazing on the yonder side of it. He was also rather proud of his avenue; he believed it was the only avenue of Turkey oaks in north Wiltshire. The house itself was small, and its garden front had been modernized in 1790. But it suited him very well. A plain English farmer—he did not pretend to be more than that—could not in reason expect the whole of his house to be unspoiled Palladian, and even modern central heating does not resolve the incompatibility of an English climate with the style of the Villa Malcontenta.