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 groaning 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