Tess of the d'Urbervilles By : Thomas Hardy

After Tess had settled down to her cow, there was for a time no talk in the barn. Not a sound interfered with the purr of the milk-jets into the numerous pails, except a momentary exclamation to one or other of the beasts requesting her to turn round or stand still. The only movements were those of the milkers' hands up and down, and the swing of the cows' tails. Thus they all worked on, encompassed by the vast flat meadow which extended to either slope of the valley.

"To my thinking," said the dairyman, rising suddenly from a cow he had just finished off, snatching up his three-legged stool in one hand and the pail in the other, and moving on to the next hard-yielder in his vicinity; "to my thinking, the cows don't give down their milk today as usual. Upon my life, if Winker begins keeping back like this, she'll not be worth milking by midsummer."

"'Tis because there's a new hand come among us," said Jonathan Kail. "I've noticed such things before."

"To be sure. It may be so. I didn't think of that."

"I've been told that it goes up into their horns at times like this," said a dairymaid.

"Well, I don't know about that," said the dairyman, "but these cows do certainly keep back their milk today. Folks, we must sing them a song or two. That's the only cure for it."

Adapted from Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, 1891.

What inference can be made based on the highlighted sentence in the passage?

A. The new cowhand doesn’t know how to use a three-legged stool to milk a cow.

B. When cows get nervous, they can't be milked as easily.

C. A new milker has to be careful because a cow might get spooked and use its horns.

D. Because Tess is present, the workers must sing to the cows.​