Mrs. Brown was not a woman who was easily disconcerted; she could have borne the assault of all the ladies of the parish and given them as good, nay, much more than they could have given her: for though Mrs. Plowden had a good steady command of words when she was scolding the servants at the Rectory, she never could have stood for a moment before the much more nimble and fiery tongue of the schoolmistress. But before Jim’s assertion of her irreproachableness and conviction that her only disadvantage was that she had seen better days, Mrs. Brown was utterly silenced; she could not answer the boy a word; she was a woman quite ready to laugh at the idea of innocence in a young man, but when she was thus brought face to face with it, instead of laughing she was struck dumb; she could not make him any reply; she pretended to be busy with the lamp, raising and then lowering the light, and then she left the room altogether without a word. Poor Jim felt that he must have offended her by this untoward allusion to better days. Did she think by any chance that he was taunting her with her poverty, or that anybody in the world, at least anybody at Watcham, could think the less of her? Perhaps he ought not even to have said that; he ought to have made sure that it went without saying, a certainty that it was half an offence to put into words. As, however, he sat pondering this in doubt and fear, Mrs. Brown came back all smiles, bringing that familiar tall glass foaming high with the drink which nobody in Watcham could compound--nobody he had ever known before. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I thought you were angry; and here you come like--like Hebe, you know--with nectar in your hand.’ ‘I am rather an elderly Hebe,’ she said, ‘but it’s a pretty comparison all the same. If I were young and blooming instead of being old and dried up, I should have made you a curtsey for your compliment; but there’s this compensation, Mr. Jim, that a Hebe of seventeen, which is, I believe, the right age, would probably not know how to make up a drink like this. Taste it, and tell me if it isn’t the very nicest I have made for you yet?’ ‘It is nectar,’ said Jim fervently; ‘but,’ he added, ‘do you know, I wish you wouldn’t make me such delicious things to drink. Why should I give you all this trouble, and’--he paused, and added, embarrassed--‘expense too?’ Mrs. Brown laughed and clapped her hands. ‘Expense, too!’ she cried; ‘how good! Oh, you don’t know how I get the materials, and how little they cost me; people I used to employ in--in what you call my better days, are so faithful to me. As you say, Mr. Jim, the world isn’t at all such a hard place as one thinks; and even the ladies of the parish--but you do amuse me so with your stories of the parish--it’s such an odd little world, isn’t it? Tell me, what are they saying about Leo Swinford? Has any one made up her mind to marry him? That’s what I expect to hear every day.’