She was vaguely conscious of inferiority to Dora from a literary point of
view, and talked with abject humility to her own daughter of all things
appertaining to books. But on all other points connected with the child
of her old age this quiet little woman was absolute mistress. Years
before the Rector had made a great mistake; he had, as the plain-spoken
East Burgen doctor put it, made an ass of himself on the matter of a
childish illness, thereby imperilling Dora's half-fledged little life.
Mrs. Glynde had then, like a diminutive tigress, stood up boldly before
her awesome lord and master, saying such things to him that the
remembrance of them made her catch her breath even now. From that time
forth the Rector was allowed to hold forth on symptoms to his heart's
content, to take down from his library shelf a stout misguided book of
medical short-cuts to the grave, but nothing more.

He never referred to the asinine business, and in the course of
years he forgave the doctor (having in view the fact that that
practitioner had been carried away by a right and proper sense of the
importance of the case), but he tacitly acknowledged that in the practice
of home-administered medical assistance, his knowledge was second to a
mother's instinct.

"It appears," he said sharply, while he was stirring his tea, "that Jem
Agar has got his commission in a Goorkha regiment."

Now Mrs. Glynde knew more about the organisation of the heavenly bands
than of the administration of the Indian army. She did not know whether
to rejoice or lament, and having been sharply pulled up--any time during
the last twenty years--for doing one or the other in the wrong place, she
meekly took soundings.