“You’ve got a baby in her all right.”
“I have that honour!” grinned Mellors.
“Honour, by God!” Sir Malcolm gave a little squirting laugh, and became Scotch and lewd. “Honour! How was the going, eh? Good, my boy, what!?”
“Good!”
“I’ll bet it was! Ha-ha! My daughter, chip of the old block, what! I never went back on a good bit of fucking, myself. Though her mother, oh, holy saints!” he rolled his eyes to heaven. “But you warmed her up, oh, you warmed her up, I can see that. Ha-ha! My blood in her! You set fire to her haystack all right. Ha-ha-ha! I was jolly glad of it, I can tell you. She needed it. Oh, she’s a nice girl, she’s a nice girl, and I knew she’d be good going, if only some damned man would set her stack on fire! Ha-ha-ha! A gamekeeper, eh, my boy! Bloody good poacher, if you ask me. Ha-ha! But now, look here, speaking seriously, what are we going to do about it? Speaking seriously, you know!”
Speaking seriously, they didn’t get very far. Mellors, though a little tipsy, was much the soberer of the two. He kept the conversation as intelligent as possible: which isn’t saying much.
“So you’re a gamekeeper! Oh, you’re quite right! That sort of game is worth a man’s while, eh, what? The test of a woman is when you pinch her bottom. You can tell just by the feel of her bottom if she’s going to come up all right. Ha-Ha! I envy you, my boy. How old are you?”
“Thirty-nine.”
The knight lifted his eyebrows.
“As much as that! Well, you’ve another good twenty years, by the look of you. Oh, gamekeeper or not, you’re a good cock. I can see that with one