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.