Farmer Best slapped his thigh.  “Bray-vo, ma’am! and you never spoke a truer word.”

“I only wish to add,” the Vicar persisted, “that before any outside society works in this parish, I shall urge very strongly that the parish nominates its agents:  and that I hope to have the pleasure of proposing Mrs Polsue and Mr Hambly.  One more word—­”

“Certainly not.”  His wife cut him short with a sharp rap on the table.  “I can rule you out of order, at all events!”

Everybody laughed.  Even Mrs Polsue was mollified.  “Well, I managed to drag the truth out at last,” 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.”