
    »Not if it should happen to have been a tame bull, you little Infidel?« said
Mrs. Pipchin.
    As Paul had not considered the subject in that light, and had founded his
conclusions on the alleged lunacy of the bull, he allowed himself to be put down
for the present. But he sat turning it over in his mind, with such an obvious
intention of fixing Mrs. Pipchin presently, that even that hardy old lady deemed
it prudent to retreat until he should have forgotten the subject.
    From that time, Mrs. Pipchin appeared to have something of the same odd kind
of attraction towards Paul, as Paul had towards her. She would make him move his
chair to her side of the fire, instead of sitting opposite; and there he would
remain in a nook between Mrs. Pipchin and the fender, with all the light of his
little face absorbed into the black bombazeen drapery, studying every line and
wrinkle of her countenance, and peering at the hard grey eye, until Mrs. Pipchin
was sometimes fain to shut it on pretence of dozing. Mrs. Pipchin had an old
black cat, who generally lay coiled upon the centre foot of the fender, purring
egotistically, and winking at the fire until the contracted pupils of his eyes
were like two notes of admiration. The good old lady might have been - not to
record it disrespectfully - a witch, and Paul and the cat her two familiars, as
they all sat by the fire together. It would have been quite in keeping with the
appearance of the party if they had all sprung up the chimney in a high wind one
night, and never been heard of any more.
    This, however, never came to pass. The cat, and Paul, and Mrs. Pipchin, were
constantly to be found in their usual places after dark; and Paul, eschewing the
companionship of Master Bitherstone, went on studying Mrs. Pipchin, and the cat,
and the fire, night after night, as if they were a book of necromancy, in three
volumes.
    Mrs. Wickam put her own construction on Paul's eccentricities: and being
confirmed in her low spirits by a perplexed view of chimneys from the room where
she was accustomed to sit, and by the noise of the wind, and by the general
dulness (gashliness was Mrs. Wickam's strong expression) of her present life,
deduced the most dismal reflections from the foregoing premises. It was a part
of Mrs. Pipchin's policy to prevent her own young hussy - that was Mrs.
Pipchin's generic name for female
