It was characteristic of her that, with this purchase in view, she made no efforts to save money.  She set out to make it instead, and her money-making was all of the developing, adventurous kind—­she ploughed more grass, and decided to keep three times the number of cows and open a milk-round.

As a general practice only a few cows were kept on the Marsh farms, for, owing to the shallowness of the dykes, it was difficult to prevent their straying.  However, Joanna boldly decided to fence all the Further Innings.  She could spare that amount of grazing, and though she would have to keep down the numbers of her sheep till after she had bought Great Ansdore, she expected to make more money out of the milk and dairy produce—­she might even in time open a dairy business in Rye.  This would involve the engaging of an extra girl for the dairy and chickens, and an extra man to help Broadhurst with the cows, but Joanna 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.