Three hundred pounds! Under the most favourable market conditions that
he could imagine his prized Clover Fairy would hardly fetch a hundred,
yet here was a piece of varnished canvas, painted by his half-brother,
selling for three times that sum. It was a cruel insult that went home
with all the more force because it emphasised the triumph of the
patronising, self-satisfied Laurence. The young farmer had meant to put
his relative just a little out of conceit with himself by displaying the
jewel of his possessions, and now the tables were turned, and his valued
beast was made to look cheap and insignificant beside the price paid for
a mere picture. It was so monstrously unjust; the painting would never
be anything more than a dexterous piece of counterfeit life, while Clover
Fairy was the real thing, a monarch in his little world, a personality in
the countryside. After he was dead, even, he would still be something of
a personality; his descendants would graze in those valley meadows and
hillside pastures, they would fill stall and byre and milking-shed, their
good red coats would speckle the landscape and crowd the market-place;
men would note a promising heifer or a well-proportioned steer, and say:
"Ah, that one comes of good old Clover Fairy's stock.
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