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Having finished his cider, Bowden stood in the kitchen porch looking idly at a dance of gnats. The weather was fine, and the hay was in. It was one of those intervals between harvests which he was wont to take easy, and it would amuse him to think of his neighbour always ‘puzzivantin’’ over some ‘improvement’ or other. But it did not amuse him this evening. That chap was for ever trying to sneak ahead of his neighbours, and had gone and shot his dog! He caught sight of his son Ned, who had just milked the cows and was turning them down the lane. Now the lad would ‘slick himself up’ and go courting that niece of Steer’s. The courtship seemed to Bowden suddenly unnatural. A cough made him conscious of the girl Pansy standing behind him with her sleeves rolled up.

“Butiful evenin’,” he said, “gude for the corn.” When Bowden indulged his sense of the æsthetic, he would, as it were, apologise with some comment that implied commercial benefit or loss; while Steer would pass on with only a dry ‘Fine evenin’.’ In talking with Steer one never lost consciousness of his keen ‘on-the-makeness,’ as of a progressive individualist who has nothing to cover his nature from one’s eyes. Bowden one might meet for weeks without realising that beneath his uncontradictious pleasantry was a self-preservative individualism quite as stubborn. To the casual eye Steer was much more up-to-date and ‘civilised’; to one looking deeper, Bowden had been ‘civilised’ much longer. He had grown protective covering in a softer climate or drawn it outward from an older strain of blood.