"No? She's the Queen of Snobs; looks as if she'd come out of a joke-book, doesn't she? and her name is—I forget. She lives in a big house a mile away. That's a 'pub.' There are seven 'pubs' in this village, and this is a model village—at least, they call it so; what an immodel village in England must be, I don't know. There's a tailor lives in that little house; he preaches in the tin chapel at the cross-roads. I heard him last Sunday."
"You go to Chapel?"
"No, I'm Church. I heard him as I was passing by—couldn't help it, he shouts so's you can hear him at 'The Roost' when the wind's blowing that way—You religious?"
"Not very, I'm afraid."
"Neither'm I. That's the doctor's; he's Church and his wife's Chapel. She has a sister in a lunatic asylum, and her aunt was sister of the hair-cutter's first wife, so people despise her and fling it in her teeth. We can raise some snobs in the States, but they're button mushrooms to the toadstools you raise in England. Pamela is awfully good to the doctor's wife just because the other people are nasty to her. Pamela is grit all through. The parson lives there—a long, thin man, looks as if he'd been mangled, and they'd forgot to hang him out to dry. How are you, Mrs Jones? and how are the rheumatics?" Miss Morgan had paused to address an old lady who stood at the door of a cottage leaning on a stick.
"That's Mrs Jones; she has more enquiries after her health than any woman in England. Can you tell why?"
"No."
"Well, she has a sort of rheumatics that the least damp affects, and so she's the best barometer in this part of the country. She's eighty, and has been used to weather observation so long, she can tell what's coming—hail, or snow, or rain to a T. That old man leaning on the gate, he's Francis, the village lunatic, he's just ninety; fine days he crawls down to Ditchingham cross-roads to wait for the soldiers coming back from the Crimea. I call that pathetic, but they only laugh at it here. He must have waited for them when he was a boy and seen them marching along, and now he goes and waits for them—makes me feel s'if I could cry. Here's a shilling for you, Francis; Miss Pamela is knitting you some socks—good-day—poor old thing! Let's see now, those cottages are all work-people's, and there's nothing beyond, only the road, and it's dusty, and I vote to go back. Why, there's that old scamp of a Francis making a bee-line for the 'Hand in Hand'; n'mind, I won't have to wear his head in the morning."
Miss Morgan chatted all the way back uninterruptedly, disclosing a more than comprehensive knowledge of all the affairs of the village in which she had lived some ten days or less.
At the gate of "The Roost" she stopped suddenly. "My, what a pity!"