'I do not know the female equivalent of the word "confederate", Mrs Stringer,' he had said.

'Nor do I,' Lydia had said.

'But your confederate, Miss Mary Richardson, has destroyed one of our greatest paintings.'

'Has she?' the wife had said, not yet having seen the Press.

'The report was in The Times this morning,' said Henderson.

'Which painting was it?' enquired the wife. 'Just out of interest.'

'You seem pretty sanguine about the whole business,' he'd replied. 'But then you are part of the women's Co-operative Movement and you agitate on behalf of the suffragettes.'

'Agitate!' said the wife. 'I wouldn't know how to agitate if you paid me.'

'Oh, I think you would,' he said, at which I had to cut in.

'We're just off actually, Mr Henderson,' I said.

He tipped his derby hat at me, but continued to address the wife: 'I do believe you are a symptom of the malaise afflicting the country, Mrs Stringer.'

And then of course he'd given a grin.

'You are a symptom of the malaise afflicting the country,' I said to Lydia as we walked on down the dusty road, in the light rain, making for the boot maker and mender's with the lamps overdue for lighting but old man Shannon nowhere in sight. 'What do you make of that?'

'I'm rather flattered,' she said, as we turned in at the gate of the boot maker's long front yard.

'Yes,' I said, 'I could see. You coloured up.'

'I certainly did not,' she said.

But she had done, and the colour was up in her face still as she lay on the sofa in our new front parlour, in the new (and also very old) house a little way outside the village, the house that had been practically given us by that same Robert Henderson: seven shillings a week for a place three times the size of our earlier one, and with a contract giving us the option to buy at some equally favourable rate.