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Also she found more fault with the beauties of Ansdore's best parlour than the rigours of its kitchen; there lay the sting her revolt was not against the toils and austerities of the farm's life but against its glories and comelinesses. She despised Ansdore for its very splendours, just as she despised her sister's best clothes more than her old ones.
Traps lurched over the shingle of Ansdore's drive, the Pricketts walked off across the innings to Great Ansdore, guests from Rye packed into two hired wagonettes, and the cousins from the Isle of Wight drove back to the George, where, as there were eight of them and they refused to be separated, Joanna was munificently entertaining them instead of under her own roof.
Joanna changed for it into smart, stiff silk blouses, with a great deal of lace and guipure about them, while Ellen wore a rest-gown of drifting black charmeuse. Mene Tekel was promoted from the dairy to be Ansdore's first parlourmaid, and wore a cap and apron, and waited at table.
"Oh, it ain't just for his sake, it's for my own. I don't want a strange man messing around, and Ansdore's mine, and I'm proud of it." Huxtable rubbed his large nose, from either side of which his sharp eyes looked disapprovingly at Joanna. He admired her, but she maddened him by refusing to see the obvious side of her femininity.
She thought of her sister alone for the last time in her big flowery bedroom, lying down for the last time in the rose-curtained, mahogany bed, for her last night's rest under Ansdore's roof. It was the night on which, if she had not been motherless, her mother would have gone to her with love and advice. Surely on this night of all nights it was not for Joanna to shirk the mother's part.
She had admirers of her own, but she soon grew tired of them would have grown tired sooner if Joanna had not clucked and shoo'd them away, thus giving them the glamour of the forbidden thing. Joanna looked upon them all as detrimentals, presumptuously lifting up their eyes to Ansdore's wealth and Ellen's beauty.
Joanna was not discouraged, nor even offended, for she interpreted all Prickett's remarks in the light of Great Ansdore's jealousy of Little Ansdore. Later on Martha Tilden told her that they were saying much the same at the Woolpack. "I don't care what they say at the Woolpack," cried Joanna, "and what business have you to know what they say there? I don't like my gals hanging around pubs."
They turned up Ansdore's drive, now neatly gravelled and gated, and a flood of light burst over the gables of the house, pouring on Joanna as she climbed down over the wheel. She required no help, and he knew it, but she felt his hands pressing her waist; she started away, and she saw him laugh mocking her. She nearly cried. The rest of that evening was awkward and unhappy.
'Our Flat' it was called, and all done by respectable people not an actor or an actress among 'em." What on earth had he picked up? "Do you live at Rye?" "I live two mile out of it Ansdore's the name of my place Ansdore Manor, seeing as now I've got both Great and Little Ansdore, and the living's in my gift. I put in a new parson last year."
The lambs were not only poor in wool, but coarse in meat, and the butchers would not deal, small mutton being the fashion. Altogether they fetched lower prices than the Kent lambs, and the rumour of Ansdore's losses mounted to over four hundred pounds.
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