w the butter turns out?"

But Bella tossed her head at the idea of working, as she expressed it,
"like a common servant", or indeed at working at all. She considered
that her business in life was to be genteel, and to be properly genteel
was to do nothing useful. So she studied the fashion books which Gusta
sent from London, made up wonderful costumes for herself, curled her
hair in the last style, and read the stories about dukes and earls and
countesses which came out in the _Family Herald_.

The smart bonnets and dresses which Mrs Greenways and her daughters
wore on Sundays in spite of hard times and poor crops and debt were the
wonder of the whole congregation, and in Mrs White's case the wonder
was mixed with scorn. "Peter's the only one among 'em as is good for
anything," she sometimes said, "an' he's naught but a puzzle-headed sort
of a chap." Peter was the farmer's only son, a loutish youth of
fifteen, steady and plodding as his plough horses and almost as silent.

It was April again, bright and breezy, and all the cherry trees at the
farm were so white with bloom that standing under them you could
scarcely see the sky. The grass in the orchard was freshly green and
sprinkled with daisies, amongst which families of fluffy yellow
ducklings trod awkwardly about on their little splay feet, while the
careful mother hens picked out the best morsels of food for them. This
food was flung out of a basin by Agnetta Greenways, who stood there
squarely erect uttering a monotonous "Chuck, chuck, chuck," at
intervals. Agnetta did not care for the poultry, or indeed for any of
the creatures on the farm; they were to her only troublesome things that
wanted looking after, and she would have liked not to have had anything
to do with them. Just now, however, there was a week's holiday at the
school, and she was obliged to use her leisure in helping her mother,
much against her will. Agnetta had a stolid face with a great deal of
colour in her cheeks; her hair was black, but at this hour it was so
tightly done up in curl papers that the colour could hardly be seen.
She wore an old red merino dress which had once been a smart one, but
was now degraded to what she called "dirty work", and was covered with
patches and stains. Her hands and wrists were very large, and looked
capable of hard work, as indeed did the whole person of Agnetta from top
to toe.

"Chuck, chuck, chuck," she repeated as she threw out the last spoon