‘It is that woman in Mead Lane, who is always in trouble. Mr. Osborne,’ said Florence, so anxious to keep her voice firm that she gave the name an emphasis and importance she had no intention of giving, ‘had been sent for to see her last night.’ ‘Osborne! he’s always finding a mare’s nest somewhere--do you mean that woman that always is in trouble, as you say?--trouble, indeed! drink you mean, and all that follows. If he could get her to take the pledge it might do some good: that’s if she would keep it--which I don’t believe for a moment.’ ‘Then why should he take the trouble, papa, if it is to do no good?’ ‘That’s what I tell him for ever: but he believes in himself, the young prig: I wish he would keep to his own business, and not mix himself up with things he cannot possibly understand.’ ‘My dear James,’ said Mrs. Plowden, ‘Mr. Osborne is an excellent young man. There has not been a curate in the parish I have liked so much since Mr. Sinclair’s time. And he is very well connected and well-off, I believe, and altogether a creditable person to have about--an Oxford man and all that.’ ‘That’s why he gives himself so many airs,’ the Rector said--which was not to say that the Rector did not really approve of Mr. Osborne, but only that it was his rôle to take the critical side. Mrs. Plowden, for her part, knew very well what was going on, and though she had burst forth in the fulness of her heart to her sister-in-law upon his shortcomings, she was on ordinary occasions very careful to keep up Mr. Osborne’s reputation, and to impress Florence with a due sense of all his qualities. Now there arose a testimony in Mr. Osborne’s favour which was totally unexpected. ‘He wasn’t at all a bad lot at Oxford, said Jim. ‘Fellows that knew him liked him there: he played racquets for the University, and won. I wonder if he ever gets a game now.’ ‘You astonish me, Jim,’ said Mrs. Plowden. ‘I never should have thought he was a man for games. What is racquets? is it a kind of tennis? for of course tennis is played with racquets. Perhaps we could get up a game for him here.’ At this Jim laughed loudly, and his father, who did not often join in his jokes, such as they were, backed him up faintly with a smile. ‘No, I don’t think we could get up a game for him here. It’s a tremendous game; not like anything so simple as lawn tennis. It is the old _jeu de paume_, isn’t it?’ said the Rector, ‘the beginning of them all.’ A conversation between the Rector and his son, on a general subject, on a question, something they were both interested in, without reproof on one side, or defence on the other: what a thing that was! Mrs. Plowden’s eyes grew lambent with the light of unusual happiness; after a moment she said: ‘I suppose you play it, Jim?’ ‘I!’ said the young man. ‘Oh, I’m not half enough of a swell for that, mother.’ ‘I don’t see,’ said the mother, half happy, half indignant, ‘why you shouldn’t be swell enough, Jim, to do anything Mr. Osborne does.’