yours is worth more than L500?"

"I should just about think it is--it's worth something more like five
thousand if the truth was known."

"Well, I shouldn't enlarge on that. Do you think it worth while to
serve an objection? No doubt there are grounds on which we could appeal,
but they aren't very good, and candidly I think we'd lose. It would cost
you a great deal of money, too, before you'd finished."

"I don't care about that. I'm not going to sit down quiet and have my
rightful belongings taken from me."

Edward Huxtable considered that he had done his duty in warning
Joanna--lots of lawyers wouldn't have troubled to do that--and after all
the old girl had heaps of money to lose. She might as well have her fun
and he his fee.

"Well, anyhow we'll go as far as the Commissioners. If I were you, I
shouldn't apply for total exemption, but for a rebate. We might do
something with allowances. Let me see, what did you sell for?"...

He finally prepared an involved case, partly depending on the death
duties that had already been paid when Joanna inherited Alce's farm, and
which he said ought to be considered in calculating increment value.
Joanna would not have confessed for worlds that she did not understand
the grounds of her appeal, though she wished Edward Huxtable would let
her make at least some reference to her steam tractor, and thus win her
victory on moral grounds, instead of just through some lawyer's mess.
But, moral appeal or lawyer's mess, her case should go to the
Commissioners, and if necessary to the High Court. Just because she knew
that in her own home and parish the fighting spirit was failing her,
Joanna resolved to fight this battle outside it without counting the
cost.

Sec.8

That autumn she had her first twinge of rheumatism. The days of the
marsh ague were over, but the dread "rheumatiz" still twisted
comparatively young bones. Joanna had escaped till a later age than
many, for her work lay mostly in dry kitchens and bricked yards, and she
had had little personal contact with the soil, that odorous sponge of
the marsh earth, rank with the soakings of sea-fogs and land-fogs.

Like most healthy people, she made a tremendous fuss once she was laid
up. Mene Tekel and Mrs. Tolhurst were kept flying up and down stairs
with hot bricks and poultices and that particularly noxious brew of
camomile tea which she looked upon as the cure of every ill. Ellen would
come now and then and sit on h