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Of course she liked him the best, too, but it would be more satisfactory from every practical point of view to work with a man she liked than with a man she did not like Joanna liked a man to look a man, and she did not mind if he was a bit of a child too.... Yes, she would engage Socknersh; his "characters," though short, were most satisfactory he was "good with sheep and lambs," she could remember "hard-working" "patient".... She wrote to Botolph's Bridge that evening, and engaged him to come to her at the end of the week.
Socknersh was inclined to be aghast at all the money the affair would cost, but Joanna soon talked him into an agreeable "Surelye." "We'll get it all back," she told him. "Our lambs ull be the biggest at market, and ull fetch the biggest prices too."
"Seemingly," continued Joanna, "everyone on this farm hears everything before I do, and it ain't right. Next time you hear a lot of tedious gossip, Dick Socknersh, you come and tell me, and don't waste it on the gals, making them idle." She went away, her eyes bright with anger, and then suddenly her heart smote her. Suppose Socknersh took offence and gave notice.
"Nor of her looker he! he!" joined in Furnese with a glance in Joanna's direction. She was talking to Dick Socknersh, who had been to church with the other hands that could be spared from the farm. She asked him if he had liked the sermon, and then told him to get off home quickly and give the tegs their swill. "Reckon he don't know a teg from a tup," said Furnese. "Oh, surelye, Mr.
"Good sakes! Whatever's the matter with me?" thought Joanna. Her apology took the discreet form of a side of bacon, and Socknersh did not give notice had evidently never thought of it. Of course the shearers spread the story of Joanna's outburst when they went on to Slinches and Birdskitchen and other farms, but no one was surprised that the shepherd stayed on.
I don't care.... But it'll be a mortal trouble getting another looker and settling him to my ways and I'll never get a man who'll mind me as poor Socknersh does. I want a man with a humble soul, but seemingly you can't get that through advertising...." She had come to the bridge over the Kent Ditch, and Sussex ended in a swamp of reeds.
They did not last long, and she finally abandoned both in disgust, but a side of her, always active unconsciously, was now disturbingly awake, requiring more concrete satisfactions than the veiled, self-deceiving episode of Socknersh. She was ashamed of this. And it made her withdraw from comforts she might have had.
You go now and ask Grace Wickens, my gal, to give you a cup of hot cocoa." Young Socknersh went, stooping his shock-head still lower as he passed under the worn oak lintel of the kitchen door. Joanna interviewed the shepherd from Honeychild, a man from Slinches, another from Anvil Green inland, and one from Chilleye, on Pevensey marsh beyond Marlingate.
They had grown used to her at Ansdore, where at first her mastership had shocked them; the scandal and contempt aroused by the Socknersh episode were definitely dead, and men took off their hats to the strenuousness with which she had pulled the farm together, and faced a crisis that would have meant disaster to many of her neighbours.
She had come to him as Ansdore to North Farthing but he had stripped her of Ansdore, and she was just Joanna Godden who had waited twenty-eight years for love. Yet, perhaps because she had waited so long, she was now a little afraid. She had hitherto met love only in the dim forms of Arthur Alce and Dick Socknersh, with still more hazy images in the courtships of Abbot and Cobb.
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