] Sounds like impudence to me.

I find the character of Mrs. Jennings delightful, at least in print. My current supervisor is a "Mrs. Jennings" in many ways, and after a while the constant "impudence" does become tiring. In real life, as in print, the Mrs. Jennings of the world are basically good hearted, generous people who seem to lack some internal mechanism that signals the rest of us to STOP! Whatever pops into their head comes out of the mouth without any editing...sometimes the results are amusing, sometimes the results are annoying, and sometimes the results are devastatingly negative...and they rarely, if ever, see the difference.