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Most of them were shocked, in spite of the scarf and the long gloves, but then it was just like Joanna Godden to swing bravely through an occasion into which most women would have crept. She saw that she had made a sensation, which she had expected and desired, and her physical modesty being appeased, she had no objection to the men's following eyes.
She felt proud of her position she pictured every farmer's wife on the Marsh lying awake that night so that she could ask her husband directly he came upstairs how Joanna Godden had looked, what she had said, and what she had worn. At dinner she sat on the Chairman's right. On her other side, owing to some accident of push and shuffle, sat young Martin Trevor.
Godden seemed a poor thing compared to all this might of Inland Revenue Commissioners, spreading about her in passage and hall and tower.... The law had suddenly become formidable, as it had never been in Edward Huxtable's office.... However, she was fortunate in finding him, with the help of one or two policemen, and the sight of him comforted her with its suggestion of home and Watchbell Street, and her trap waiting in the sunshine outside the ancient door of the Huxtable dwelling.
His liking was largely physical he wouldn't have believed a month ago that he should ever find Joanna Godden attractive, but to-day the melting of his prejudice seemed to come chiefly from her warm beauty, from the rich colouring of her face and the flying sunniness of her hair, from her wide mouth with its wide smile, from the broad, strong set of her shoulders, and the sturdy tenderness of her breast.
The Woolpack was inclined to be contemptuous. "Five thousand pounds for Prickett's old shacks, and his mouldy pastures that are all burdock and fluke. If Joanna Godden had had any know, she could have beaten him down fifteen hundred he was bound to sell, and she was a fool not to make him sell at her price."
If Arthur Alce appeared a silence would fall on the company, to be broken at last by some remark on the price of wool or the Rye United's last match. Everybody was sorry for Alce, everybody thought that Thomas Godden had treated him badly by not making his daughter marry him as a condition of her inheritance.
But now, I don't care when I marry Joanna Godden I'll take root, I'll belong to the Marsh, I'll be at home. You don't know Joanna Godden, Lawrence if you did I believe you'd like her. She's so sane and simple she's so warm and alive; and she's good, too when I met her to-day, she had just been to Communion.
Miss Godden, she might impart them to us," said the Squire from a little farther down. "She's learning how to dance and make curtsies right down to the floor," said Joanna. "Then she's fit to see the Queen. You really mustn't keep her away from us at Christmas on the contrary, we ought to make some opportunities for watching her dance; she must be as pretty as a sprite."
She was terribly afraid of scaring him off. It had occurred to her more than once that his bonds held him far more lightly than she was held by hers. And the prospect of marriage was now an absolute necessity if she was to endure her memories. Marriage alone could hallow and remake Joanna Godden.
A porter came to fetch her box, but Joanna the great Joanna Godden, who put terror into the markets of three towns shrank back into the taxi, loath to leave its comfortable shelter for the effort and racket of the station. A dark, handsome, rather elderly man, was coming out of one of the archways. Their eyes met and he at once turned his away, but Joanna leapt for him "Sir Harry!
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