United States or India ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Of course she had been to the Metropole at Folkestone whatever place Joanna visited, whether Brodnyx or Folkestone, she went to the best hotel so she was not uninitiated in the mysteries of hotel menus and lifts and hall porters, and other phenomena that alarm the simple-minded; but that was many years ago, and it was more years still since she had slept away from Ansdore, out of her own big bed with its feather mattress and flowered curtains, so unlike this narrow hotel arrangement, all box mattress and brass knobs.
The days till Christmas were full of strain. Joanna had won her victory, but she did not find it a satisfying one. Ellen's position in the Ansdore household was that of a sulky rebel resentful, plaintive, a nurse of hard memories too close to be ignored, too hostile to be trusted. The tyrant groaned under the heel of her victim.
It was not that she did not consider the rectory a fit match for Ansdore, even with only two hundred a year attached to it, but she was furious that Mr. Pratt should think it possible that she could fancy him as a man "a little rabbity chap like him, turned fifty, and scarce a hair on him. If he wants another wife at his age he should get an old maid like Miss Godfrey or a hopeful widder like Mrs.
Ansdore was a manor now the largest estate not only in Brodnyx and Pedlinge, but on Walland Marsh; indeed the whole of the Three Marshes had little to beat it with. Moreover, Ellen was beginning to get her own way in the house her bedroom was no longer a compulsory bower of roses, but softly cream-coloured and purple-hung.
Have you absolutely no delicacy, Jo? Can't you see how awkward it'll be for me if everywhere I go I run the risk of meeting him? Besides, you'll be always plaguing me to go back to him, and I tell you I'll never do that never." Arthur, too, did not seem anxious to stay. He saw that if Ellen was at Ansdore he could not be continually running to and fro on his errands for Joanna.
She accepted Martin's rather unreasonable displeasure without protest, for she felt guilty about other things. Was he right, after all, when he said that she was putting Ansdore between them?... She did not feel that she was, any more than she was putting Ansdore between herself and Ellen. But she hated him to have the thought. Should she give in and tell him he could call on Mr.
"I'm sorry I've offended you" he spoke stiffly "but since you came here it's struck me, too, that things were different. I must say, Joanna, you don't seem to have considered the difficulties of my position." "I have and that's one reason why I'm going. I don't want to take you away from your business and your career, as you say; I know you don't want to come and live at Ansdore ..."
Southland and Maggie Furnese, bridling a little under their glances, while she discussed servants, and food-prices, and a new way of pickling eggs. She parted from them at Ansdore, and she and Ellen went in to their Sunday's dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. After this the day would proceed according to the well-laid ceremonial that Joanna loved.
The generosity of the neighbourhood amounted to five shillings from Prickett of Great Ansdore, and half-crowns from Vine, Furnese, Vennal, and a few others. As Joanna studied it she became possessed of two emotions one was a feeling that since others, including Great Ansdore, had given, she could not in proper pride hold back, the other was a queer savage pity for Mr.
Its eternal flatness the monotony of its roads winding through an unvarying landscape of reeds and dykes and grazings, past farms each of which was almost exactly like the one before it, with red walls and orange roofs and a bush of elms and oaks the wearisome repetition of its seasons the mists and floods of winter, the may and buttercups of spring, the hay and meadow-sweet and wild carrot of the summer months, the bleakness and winds of autumn all this was typical of her life there, water-bound, cut off from all her heart's desire of variety and beauty and elegance, of the life to which she must now return because her attempt to live another had failed and left her stranded on a slag-heap of disillusion from which even Ansdore was a refuge.
Word Of The Day