start, but his antipathy was not all built on that
foundation. During the weeks he had been at home, he had heard a good
deal about her--indeed he had found her rather a dominant personality on
the Marsh--and what he had heard had not helped turn him from his first
predisposition against her.

As a young boy he had shared his brother's veneration of the Madonna,
and though, when he grew up, his natural romanticism had not led him his
brother's way, the boyish ideal had remained, and unconsciously all his
later attitude towards women was tinged with it. Joanna was certainly
not the Madonna type, and all Martin's soul revolted from her broad,
bustling ways--everywhere he went he heard stories of her busyness and
her bluff, of "what she had said to old Southland," or "the sass she had
given Vine." She seemed to him to be an arrant, pushing baggage, running
after notoriety and display. Her rudeness to Mr. Pratt was only part of
the general parcel. He looked upon her as sexless, too, and he hated
women to be sexless--his Madonna was not after Memling but after
Raphael. Though he heard constant gossip about her farming activities
and her dealings at market, he heard none about her passions, the
likelier subject. All he knew was that she had been expected for years
to marry Arthur Alce, but had not done so, and that she had also been
expected at one time to marry her looker, but had not done so. The root
of such romances must be poor indeed if this was all the flower that
gossip could give them.

Altogether he was prejudiced against Joanna Godden, and the prejudice
did not go deep enough to beget interest. He was not interested in her,
and did not expect her to be interested in him; therefore it was with
great surprise, not to say consternation, that one morning at New Romney
Market he saw her bearing down upon him with the light of battle in her
eye.

"Good morning, Mr. Trevor."

"Good morning, Miss Godden."

"Fine weather."

"Fine weather."

He would have passed on, but she barred the way, rather an imposing
figure in her bottle-green driving coat, with a fur toque pressed down
over the flying chestnut of her hair. Her cheeks were not so much
coloured as stained deep with the sun and wind of Walland Marsh, and
though it was November, a mass of little freckles smudged and scattered
over her skin. It had not occurred to him before that she was even a
good-looking creature.

"I'm thinking, Mr. Trevor," she said deli