Character sketch of miss Mebbin

Louisa Mebin
was a very shrewd and cunning character who knew how to grab a chance to gain wealth as and when opportunity knocked at her door. She can be called an opportunist. Louisa Mebbin here uses a tone of blackmail of revealing Mrs. Packletide 's secret of killing a tiger, just to extract some wealth from Mrs. Packletide. Mebbin persuade her to buy her a weekend cottage so that she keeps mum about the entire episode of whether Mrs. Packletide killed the tiger or did it die of a heart attack.

Miss Loisa Mebbin was the so called companion of Mrs. Packletide who can be best described as opportunistic and money-minded. An accomplished penny pincher, she advised Mrs. Packletide that the thousand rupees she paid for an old tiger was too much. The author sarcastically describes her stinginess by saying she has an “elder-sister attitude towards money in general”. She also has a keen eye. Only she noticed that victim of Mrs. Packletide’s bullet was the goat which was kept as bait and her intended victim, the tiger, had in fact died of a heart attack. She used this piece of information to blackmail Mrs. Packletide and successfully extorted a week-end cottage from her.