a was undaunted.
She enjoyed a gamble, when it was not merely a question of luck, but
also in part a matter of resource and planning and hard driving pace.

"There's Joanna Godden saving her tin to buy Great Ansdore," said Bates
of Picknye Bush to Cobb of Slinches, as they watched her choosing her
shorthorns at Romney. She had Arthur Alce beside her, and he was, as in
the beginning, trying to persuade her to be a little smaller in her
ideas, but, as in the beginning, she would not listen.

"Setting up cow-keeping now, is she?--Will she make as much a valiant
wonder of that as she did with her sheep? Ha! ha!"

"Ha! ha!" The two men laughed and winked and rubbed their noses, for
they liked to remember the doleful tale of Joanna's first adventure at
Ansdore; it made them able to survey more equably her steady rise in
glory ever since.

It was obvious to Walland Marsh that, on the whole, her big ideas had
succeeded where the smaller, more cautious ones of her neighbours had
failed. Of course she had been lucky--luckier than she deserved--but she
was beginning to make men wonder if after all there wasn't policy in
paying a big price for a good thing, rather than in obeying the rules of
haggle which maintained on other farms. Ansdore certainly spent half as
much again as Birdskitchen or Beggar's Bush or Misleham or Yokes Court,
but then it had nearly twice as much to show for it. Joanna was not the
woman who would fail to keep pace with her own prosperity--her swelling
credit was not recorded merely in her pass-book; it was visible, indeed
dazzling, to every eye.

She had bought a new trap and mare--a very smart turn-out, with rubber
tires and chocolate-coloured upholstery, while the mare herself had
blood in her, and a bit of the devil too, and upset the sleepy,
chumbling rows of farmers' horses waiting for their owners in the
streets of Lydd or Rye. Old Stuppeny had died in the winter following
Ellen's marriage, and had been lavishly buried, with a tombstone, and an
obituary notice in the _Rye Observer_, at Joanna's expense. In his place
she had now one of those good-looking, rather saucy-eyed young men, whom
she liked to have about her in a menial capacity. He wore a
chocolate-coloured livery made by a tailor in Marlingate, and sat on the
seat behind Joanna with his arms folded across his chest, as she spanked
along the Straight Mile.

Joanna was now thirty-three years old, and in some ways looked older
than her age