t be
expected to be liberal in that wider sense which commands majorities.«
    »I wish this man were not so much of a talker,« thought Harold; »he'll bore
me. We shall see,« he said aloud, »what can be done in the way of combination.
I'll come down to your office after one o'clock, if it will suit you?«
    »Perfectly.«
    »Ah, and you'll have all the lists and papers and necessary information
ready for me there. I must get up a dinner for the tenants, and we can invite
whom we like besides the tenants. Just now, I'm going over one of the farms on
hand with the bailiff. By the way, that's a desperately bad business, having
three farms unlet - how comes that about, eh?«
    »That is precisely what I wanted to say a few words about to you. You have
observed already how strongly Mrs Transome takes certain things to heart. You
can imagine that she has been severely tried in many ways. Mr Transome's want of
health; Mr Durfey's habits - a -«
    »Yes, yes.«
    »She is a woman for whom I naturally entertain the highest respect, and she
has had hardly any gratification for many years, except the sense of having
affairs to a certain extent in her own hands. She objects to changes; she will
not have a new style of tenants; she likes the old stock of farmers who milk
their own cows, and send their younger daughters out to service: all this makes
it difficult to do the best with the estate. I am aware things are not as they
ought to be, for, in point of fact, an improved agricultural management is a
matter in which I take considerable interest, and the farm which I myself hold
on the estate you will see, I think, to be in a superior condition. But Mrs
Transome is a woman of strong feeling, and I would urge you, my dear sir, to
make the changes which you have, but which I had not, the right to insist on, as
little painful to her as possible.«
    »I shall know what to do, sir, never fear,« said Harold, much offended.
    »You will pardon, I hope, a perhaps undue freedom of suggestion from a man
of my age, who has been so long in a close connection with the family affairs -
a - I have never considered that connection simply in the light of a