Mary said: ‘A life of hard work, and then to be shipped overseas to a foreign butcher. It doesn’t seem fair, does it?’

‘I have thought that, too,’ he said. ‘But a farmer cannot be sentimental.’

‘Can a sailor?’

‘More easily.’

‘Yourself?’

‘Sentimental? No, I am a realist.’

‘But you said that you have thought how unfair it was.’

‘One must be realistic about one’s emotions, too. Only an idealist thinks himself rational in all things.’