Thus Joanna rummaged in her small stock of experience, and of the fragments built a dream. Her plans were not now all concrete—they glowed a little, though dimly, for her memory held no great store, and her imagination was the imagination of Walland Marsh, as a barndoor fowl to the birds that fly. She might have dreamed more if her mind had not been occupied with the practical matter of welcoming Ellen home for her Christmas holidays.
Ellen, who arrived on Thomas-day, already seemed in some strange way to have grown apart from the life of Ansdore. As Joanna eagerly kissed her on the platform at Rye, there seemed something alien in her soft cool cheek, in the smoothness of her hair under the dark boater hat with its deviced hat-band.
"Hullo, Joanna," she said.
"Hullo, dearie. I've just about been pining to get you back. How are you?—how's your dancing?"—This as she bundled her up beside her in the trap, while the porter helped old Stuppeny with her trunk.
"I can dance the waltz and the polka."
"That's fine—I've promised the folks around here that you shall show 'em what you can do."
She gave Ellen another warm, proud hug, and this time the child's coolness melted a little. She rubbed her immaculate cheek against her sister's sleeve—
"Good old Jo ..."
Thus they drove home at peace together.
The peace was shattered many times between that day and Christmas. Ellen had forgotten what it was like to be slapped and what it was like to receive big smacking kisses at odd encounters in yard or passage—she resented both equally. "You're like an old bear, Jo—an awful old bear." She had picked up at school a new vocabulary, of which the word "awful," used to express every quality of pleasure or pain, was a fair sample. Joanna sometimes could not understand her—sometimes she understood too well.