The one they quarrelled about most was a fine
old gentleman with an angry face--she had seen his picture on the walls.
She had seen it on the floor too, with a rotten apple squashed over it,
for the farm had changed its politics from time to time. Martha had
never been on one side or the other; none of "they" had ever done the
farm a stroke of good. Such was her sweeping verdict, given with all a
peasant's distrust of the outside world.
When the half-frightened curiosity had somewhat faded away, Emma Ladbruk
was uncomfortably conscious of another feeling towards the old woman. She
was a quaint old tradition, lingering about the place, she was part and
parcel of the farm itself, she was something at once pathetic and
picturesque--but she was dreadfully in the way. Emma had come to the
farm full of plans for little reforms and improvements, in part the
result of training in the newest ways and methods, in part the outcome of
her own ideas and fancies. Reforms in the kitchen region, if those deaf
old ears could have been induced to give them even a hearing, would have
met with short shrift and scornful rejection, and the kitchen region
spread over the zone of dairy and market business and half the work of
the household. Emma, with the latest science of dead-poultry dressing at
her finger-tips, sat by, an unheeded watcher, while old Martha trussed
the chickens for the market-stall as she had trussed them for nearly
fourscore years--all leg and no breast.
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