She thought of one or two other men who had approached her, but had been
scared off before they had reached any definite position of courtship.
They were no good either--young Cobb of Slinches had married six months
ago, and Jack Abbot of Stock Bridge belonged to the Christian Believers,
who kept Sunday on Saturday, and in other ways fathered confusion.
Besides, she didn't want to marry just anyone who would have her--some
dull yeoman who would take her away from Ansdore, or else come with all
his stupid, antiquated, man-made notions to sit for ever on her
enterprising acres. She wanted her marriage to be some big,
neighbour-startling adventure--she wanted either to marry someone above
herself in birth and station, or else very much below. She had touched
the fringe of the latter experience and found it disappointing, so she
felt that she would now prefer the other--she would like to marry some
man of the upper classes, a lawyer or a parson or a squire. The two
first were represented in her mind by Mr. Huxtable and Mr. Pratt, and
she did not linger over them, but the image she had put up for the third
was Martin Trevor--dark, tall, well-born, comely and strong of frame,
and yet with that hidden delicacy, that weakness which Joanna must have
in a man if she was to love him....
She had been a fool about Martin Trevor--she had managed to put him
against her at the start. Of course it was silly of him to mind what she
said to Mr. Pratt, but that didn't alter the fact that she had been
stupid herself, that she had failed to make a good impression just when
she most wanted to do so. Martin Trevor was the sort of man she felt she
could "take to," for in addition to his looks he had the quality she
prized in males--the quality of inexperience; he was not likely to
meddle with her ways, since he was only a beginner and would probably be
glad of her superior knowledge and judgment. He would give her what she
wanted--his good name and his good looks and her neighbours' envious
confusion--and she would give him what he wanted, her prosperity and her
experience. North Farthing House was poorer than Ansdore in spite of
late dinners and drawing-rooms--the Trevors could look down on her from
the point of view of birth and breeding but not from any advantage more
concrete.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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