roaning
inland from Rye Bay ... with a great wail of wind and slash of rain and
a howl and shudder through all the house.

She found those months of spring and summer very dreary. She disliked
the ways of Ansdore; she met no one but common and vulgar people, who
took it for granted that she was just one of themselves. Of course she
had lived through more or less the same experiences during her holidays,
but then the contact had not been so close or so prolonged, and there
had always been the prospect of school to sustain her.

But now schooldays were over, and seemed very far away. Ellen felt cut
off from the life and interests of those happy years. She had hoped to
receive invitations to go and stay with the friends she had made at
school; but months went by and none came. Her school-friends were being
absorbed by a life very different from her own, and she was sensitive
enough to realize that parents who had not minded her associating with
their daughters while they were still at school, would not care for
their grown-up lives to be linked together. At first letters were
eagerly written and constantly received, but in time even this comfort
failed, as ways became still further divided, and Ellen found herself
faced with the alternative of complete isolation or such friendships as
she could make on the Marsh.

She chose the latter. Though she would have preferred the humblest seat
in a drawing-room to the place of honour in a farm-house kitchen, she
found a certain pleasure in impressing the rude inhabitants of Brodnyx
and Pedlinge with her breeding and taste. She accepted invitations to
"drop in after church," or to take tea, and scratched up rather
uncertain friendships with the sisters of the boys who admired her.

Joanna watched her rather anxiously. She tried to persuade herself that
Ellen was happy and no longer craved for the alien soil from which she
had been uprooted. But there was no denying her own disappointment. A
lady was not the wonderful being Joanna Godden had always imagined.
Ellen refused to sit in impressive idleness on the parlour sofa, not
because she disapproved of idleness, but because she disapproved of the
parlour and the sofa. She despised Joanna's admirers, those stout,
excellent men she was so proud of, who had asked her in marriage, "as no
one ull ever ask you, Ellen Godden, if you give yourself such airs." And
worst of all, she despised her sister ... her old Jo, on whose back she
had