mbitions and business, her love for Ellen, and
her own pride.

Sec.8

Ellen secretly despised Joanna's suitors, just as she secretly despised
all Joanna's best and most splendid things. They were a dull lot,
driving her sister home on market-day, or sitting for hours in the
parlour with Arthur Alce's mother's silver tea-set. It was always "Good
evening, Miss Godden," "Good evening, Mr. Turner"--"Fine weather for
roots"--"A bit dry for the grazing." It was not thus that Ellen Godden
understood love. Besides, these men looked oafs, in spite of the fine
build of some of them--they were not so bad in their working clothes,
with their leggings and velveteen breeches, but in their Sunday best,
which they always wore on these occasions, they looked clumsy and
ridiculous, their broad black coats in the cut of yester-year and
smelling of camphor, their high-winged collars scraping and reddening
their necks ... in their presence Ellen was rather sidling and sweet,
but away from them in the riotous privacy of her new bedroom, she
laughed to herself and jeered.

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.

"When you fall in love, you can take a stout yeoman with a bit of money,
if you can't find a real gentleman same as I did. Howsumever, you're too
young to go meddling with such things just yet. You be a good girl,
Ellen Godden, and keep your back straight, and don't let the boys kiss
you."

Ellen had no particular pleasure in letting the boys kiss her--she was a
cold-blooded little thing--but, she asked herself, what else was there
to do in a desert like Walland Marsh? The Marsh mocked her every morning
as she looked out of her window at the flat miles between Ansdore and
Dunge Ness. This was her home--this wilderness of straight dykes and
crooked roads, every mile of which was a repetition of the mile before
it. There was never any change in that landscape, except such as came
from the sky--cloud-shadows shaking like swift wings across the swamp of
buttercups and sunshine, mists lying in strange islands by the sewers,
rain turning all things grey, and the wind as it were made visible in a
queer flying look put on by the pastures when the storms came g