She was accomplished and conscientious; she could be trusted; despite appearances, her habits were cleanly.  She was also a woman of immense experience.  In addition to being one of the finest exponents of the art of step-stoning and general housework that the Five Towns could show, she had numerous other talents.  She was thoroughly accustomed to the supreme spectacles of birth and death, and could assist thereat with dignity and skill.  She could turn away the wrath of rent-collectors, rate-collectors, school-inspectors, and magistrates.  She was an adept in enticing an inebriated husband to leave a public-house.  She could feed four children for a day on sevenpence, and rise calmly to her feet after having been knocked down by one stroke of a fist.  She could go without food, sleep, and love, and yet thrive.  She could give when she had nothing, and keep her heart sweet amid every contagion.  Lastly, she could coax extra sixpences out of a pawnbroker.  She had never had a holiday, and almost never failed in her duty.  Her one social fault was a tendency to talk at great length about babies, corpses, and the qualities of rival soaps.  All her children were married.  Her husband had gone in a box to a justice whose anger Mrs. Tam’s simple tongue might not soothe.  She lived alone.  Six half-days a week she worked about the house of Mrs. Maldon from eight to one o’clock, for a shilling per half-day and her breakfast.  But if she chose to stay for it she could have dinner—­and a good one—­on condition that she washed up afterwards.  She often stayed.  After over forty years of incessant and manifold expert labour she was happy and content in this rich reward.

A long automobile came slipping with noiseless stealth down the hill, and halted opposite the gate, in silence, for the engine had been stopped higher up.  Mrs. Tams, intimidated by the august phenomenon, ceased to rub, and in alarm watched the great Thomas Batchgrew struggle unsuccessfully with the handle of the door that imprisoned him.  Mrs. Tams was a born serf, and her nature was such that she wanted to apologize to Thomas Batchgrew for the naughtiness of the door.  For her there was something monstrous in a personage like Thomas Batchgrew being balked in a desire, even for a moment, by a perverse door-catch.  Not that she really respected Thomas Batchgrew!  She did not, but he was a member of the sacred governing class.  The chauffeur—­not John’s Ernest, but a professional—­flashed round the front of the car and opened the door with obsequious haste.  For Thomas Batchgrew had to be appeased.  Already a delay of twenty minutes—­due to a defective tire and to the inexcusable absence of the spanner with which the spare wheel was manipulated—­had aroused his just anger.

Mrs. Tarns pulled the gate towards herself and, crushed behind it, curtsied to Thomas Batchgrew.  This curtsy, the most servile of all Western salutations, and now nearly unknown in Five Towns, consisted in a momentary shortening of the stature by six inches, and in nothing else.  Mrs. Tams had acquired it in her native village of Sneyd, where an earl held fast to that which was good, and she had never been able to quite lose it.  It did far more than the celerity of the chauffeur to appease Thomas Batchgrew.