She felt angry and sore with Ellen, but she was bound to admit that her grievance had a certain justification.  After all, she had always meant her to be a lady, and now, she supposed, she was merely behaving like one.  She cast about her for means of introducing her sister into the spheres she coveted ... if only Sir Harry Trevor would come home!—­But she gathered there was little prospect of that for some time.  Then she thought of Mr. Pratt, the rector....  It was the first time that she had ever considered him as a social asset—­his poverty, his inefficiency and self-depreciation had quite outweighed his gentility in her ideas; he had existed only as the Voice of the Church on Walland Marsh, and the spasmodic respect she paid him was for his office alone.  But now she began to remember that he was an educated man and a gentleman, who might supply the want in her sister’s life without in any way encouraging those more undesirable “notions” she had picked up at school.

Accordingly, Mr. Pratt, hitherto neglected, was invited to Ansdore with a frequency and enthusiasm that completely turned his head.  He spoiled the whole scheme by misinterpreting its motive, and after about the ninth tea-party, became buoyed with insane and presumptuous hopes, and proposed to Joanna.  She was overwhelmed, and did not scruple to overwhelm him, with anger and consternation.  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. Woods—­not a woman who’s had real men to love her, and ud never look at anything but a real, stout feller.”

However, she confided the proposal to Ellen, for she wanted her sister to know that she had had an offer from a clergyman, and also that she was still considered desirable—­for once or twice Ellen had thrown out troubling hints that she thought her sister middle-aged.  Of course she was turned thirty now, and hard weather and other hard things had made her inclined to look older, by reddening and lining her face.  But she had splendid eyes, hair and teeth, and neither the grace nor the energy of youth had left her body, which had coarsened into something rather magnificent, tall and strong, plump without stoutness, clean-limbed without angularity.

She could certainly now have had her pick among the unmarried farmers—­which could not have been said when she first set up her mastership at Ansdore.  Since those times men had learned to tolerate her swaggering ways, also her love affair with Martin had made her more normal, more of a soft, accessible woman.  Arthur Alce was no longer the only suitor at Ansdore—­it was well known that Sam Turner, who had lately moved from inland