was her final shot, as the meeting
resolved itself into Committee and fell to business.

She was further placated, a few minutes later, by being elected
(on the Vicar's proposition) a member of the House-to-house Visiting
Sub-Committee. "'Twill give her," Farmer Best growled to his wife,
later, as they jogged home in the gig, "the chance of her life to
poke a nose into other folks' kitchens."

Farmer Best--it should here be observed--with all his oddities, was
an exemplary Poor Law Guardian. He had small personal acquaintance
with Polpier itself: the steepness of the coombs in which it lay was
penible to a man of his weight: yet, albeit by hearsay, he knew the
inner workings of the small town, being interested in the
circumstances of all his neighbours, vividly charitable towards them,
and at the same time no fool in judging. Of the country-folk within
a circuit of twelve miles or more his knowledge was something
daemonic. He could recount their pedigrees, intermarriages, numbers
in family; he understood their straits, their degrees of affluence;
he could not look across a gate at a crop, or view the state of a
thatch, but his mind worked sympathetically with some neighbour's
economies. He gave away little in hard money; but his charities in
time and personal service were endless. And the countryside
respected him thoroughly: for he was eccentric in the fashion of a
true Englishman, and, with all his benevolence, you had to get up
early to take him in.

Nor was Farmer Best the only one to doubt Mrs Polsue's fitness for
her place in the sub-committee. Mrs Steele spoke to her husband very
positively about it as he helped to water her begonia-beds in the
cool of the evening.

"You were weak," she said, "to play up to that woman: when you know
she is odious."

"The more reason," he answered. "If you're a Christian and find your
neighbour odious, you conciliate him."

"Fiddlesticks!"

"My dear Agatha--isn't that a somewhat strong expression, for you?"

She set down her watering-pot.

"Do you know what I _want_ to say?" she asked. "I _want_ to say,
'Go to blazes!' . . . When I said the woman is odious, do you suppose
I meant odious to me or to you?"

"O-oh!" The Vicar rubbed the back of his head penitently.
"I am sorry, Agatha--I was thinking of the time she gave you this
afternoon."

"She will give those poor women a worse time--a dreadful time!" said
Mrs Steele, with conviction.

He picked up his