Whenever I went with Mama to call on grandfather’s tenant-farmers, the stink of manure, the dirty rooms where the hens were always scratching and the rusticity of their furniture seemed to me to reflect the coarseness of their souls; I would watch them labouring in the fields, covered in mud, smelling of sweat and earth, and they never once paused to contemplate the beauty of the landscape; they were ignorant of the splendours of the sunset.
