“Here I stand,” he said, without turning his head, “and here my forebears have stood, generation after generation, and looked over their own tilth and tillage. Seven Jocelyn Jernighams.”

“I’m never quite sure,” said his son Henry Jocelyn, “what tilth and tillage are. What precisely, father, is a tilth?”

“There’s no feeling for that sort of thing,” said Jocelyn, angrily, “among the present generation. Cheap sneers and clever talk that mean nothing.”

“But I assure you I like words to mean something. That is why I ask you to define a tilth. And you say, ‘the present generation.’ You mean my generation, don’t you? But I’m twenty-three. There is a newer generation than mine. If I marry Dinah — ”

“You quibble deliberately in order to lead our conversation back to this absurd suggestion. If I had known — ”

Henry uttered an impatient noise and moved away from the fireplace. He joined his father in the window and he too looked down into the darkling vale of Pen Cuckoo. He saw an austere landscape, adamant beneath drifts of winter mist. The naked trees slept soundly, the fields were dumb with cold; the few stone cottages, with their comfortable signals of blue smoke, were the only waking things in all the valley.

“I too love Pen Cuckoo,” said Henry, and he added, with that tinge of irony which Jocelyn, who did not understand it, found so irritating: “I have all the pride of prospective ownership. But I refuse to be bully-ragged by Pen Cuckoo. I refuse to play the part of a Victorian young gentleman with a touch of Cophetua thrown in. I refuse to allow this conversation to run along the lines of ancient lineage. The proud father and self-willed heir stuff simply doesn’t fit. We are not discussing a possible misalliance. Dinah is not a blushing maid of inferior station. She is part of the country, rooted equally with us. If we are going to talk about her in county terms, I can strike a suitable attitude and say there have been Copelands at the rectory for as many generations as there have been Jernighams at Pen Cuckoo.”