ight gold hair had been pulled here and there
out of its neat coils, as though she had been pushing through hedges
or groping through woods.

'It's perfectly _monstrous_!' she was thinking. 'It oughtn't to be
allowed. And when we're properly civilized, it won't be allowed. No
one ought to be free to ruin his land as he pleases! It concerns the
_State_. "Manage your land decently--produce a proper amount of
food--or out you go!" And I wouldn't have waited for war to say it!
Ugh! that place!'

And she thought with disgust of the choked and derelict fields, the
ruined gates and fences, the deserted buildings she had just been
wandering through. After the death of an old miser, who, according
to the tale she had heard in a neighbouring village, had lived there
for forty years, with a decrepit wife, both of them horribly
neglected and dirty, and making latterly no attempt to work the
farm, a new tenant had appeared who would have taken the place, if
the Squire would have rebuilt the house and steadings, and allowed a
reasonable sum for the cleansing and recovering of the land. But
the Squire would do nothing of the kind. He 'hadn't a farthing to
spend on expensive repairs,' and if the new tenant wouldn't take the
farm on the old terms, well, he might leave it alone.

The place had just been investigated by the County Committee, and a
peremptory order had been issued. What was the Squire going to do?

Elizabeth fell to thinking what _ought_ to be done with the Squire's
twelve thousand acres, if the Squire were a reasonable man. It was
exasperating to her practical sense to see a piece of business in
such a muddle. As a child and growing girl she had spent long
summers in the country with a Dorsetshire uncle who farmed his own
land, and there had sprung up in her an instinctive sympathy with
the rich old earth and its kindly powers, with the animals and the
crops, with the labourers and their rural arts, with all the
interwoven country life, and its deep rooting in the soil of history
and poetry.

Country life is, above all, steeped in common sense--the old,
ancestral, simple wisdom of primitive men. And Elizabeth, in spite
of her classical degree, and her passion for Greek pots, believed
herself to be, before everything, a person of common sense. She had
always managed her own family's affairs. She had also been the paid
secretary of an important learned society in her twenties not long
after she left college, and knew