em not to swindle you out of your just dues and on whom you have
to spy all the time to get what you should get from them."

"You do not understand," I declared.

"Right you are," said Tanno. "I do not and I do not want to."

"Just wait a moment and do not interrupt," I urged. "You do not
understand, there is no use in being a proprietor if you do not know more
than your tenantry. There are a thousand, there are ten thousand details
in which the management of the farms may be made more profitable or less
profitable, and all these details have to be watched and must be well in
the proprietor's mind."

"Could you not get some kind of overseeing general estate bailiff to do
all that for you?" he suggested.

"I can," I said, "and I'm going to get one. My uncle's overseer died of
the plague and my uncle was too old and too set in his ways to get
another, so he acted as his own overseer for the last four years of his
life. I must know of my own knowledge just how the place ought to be
managed or I can never detect and forestall unnecessary and ruinous
friction and trouble between my tenantry and any new superintending
overseer."

"I do not know," Tanno ruminated, "which to admire more, the beauties of
the Sabine tenant system or the wonders of the Sabine character. Any other
man I know would have stayed in Rome and attended strictly to his
courtship and let his estates take care of themselves. You are supposed to
be violently in love and you certainly behave like it: yet you leave Rome
and Vedia and shut yourself up among these damp cold hills and inspect and
reinspect and make a final inspection, and delay for one last peep and
linger for one final glance, where any other man would ignore the property
and be with the widow."

"I do not see anything extraordinary about it," I disclaimed. "A man needs
an income, a lover most of all."

"Income!" he snorted. "Isn't your income from your Bruttian estates ten
times the gross return from the property?"

"More than ten times," I admitted.

"Why worry about it at all then?" he demanded. "Isn't your Bruttian income
enough?"

"No income is enough," I declared, "if a man has a chance to get in more."

"Of course," he beamed, "you do not see anything extraordinary in your
petting this property. A Sabine would use up a year to get in a sesterce
from a frog pond. You are a Sabine. All Sabines worship the Almighty
Sesterce. But to anybody not a Sabine it is amazing to see a lo