Lady Farrington was a large fair woman; so fair as to be almost colourless. Her manner was not without distinction, and would have been impressive but for the vapidity of her remarks, and a trick of utterance due, seemingly, to her having too many teeth in her mouth, which robbed her words of anything like expression, and sometimes made them unintelligible. Ernest, her son, greatly took after her. He was tall, but rather shambling in gait, and still excessively thin. In voice and manner of speech he reproduced Lady Farrington exactly. His mouth also seemed full of hot potatoes, or too full of teeth; and as he had a trick of keeping it constantly open, as though to cool the potatoes, or air his teeth, his general expression was vacuous in the extreme. A rather full lower lip and a very receding chin did not add to his personal charms. You gathered at once from his face and air that he was weak, irresolute, easily led, and that he might, if misled, slide soon into vicious ways. But he had improved wonderfully since he had joined the Duke’s Own. They all said so. Even Sir Rupert, dark and undemonstrative as he was generally, thawed enough to say that he thought soldiering would make a man of Ernest--if anything would. Letitia, as Miss Farrington was called, and who in many respects resembled her father, changed her tone on seeing how much Ernest was changed for the better. Her attitude towards him had hitherto been one of patronage mixed with spite. Although outwardly she was very affectionate--in her heart she bore him a grudge because he was one of the sex commonly called superior to her own. She was the elder by three or four years; she had far more brains--‘not that that was surprising’--as she said when she was more than usually venomous, seeing that Ernest had next to none. She was a Farrington, as was evident from her likeness to her father, while her brother was clearly a Burdakin, like his mother. Why should an absurd and monstrously unfair custom constitute him the heir and future head of the family, while she must be satisfied with what her father might choose to give her as a marriage portion or as a settlement for life? She had always bitterly resented the Salic law as it obtained in England with regard to the succession of estates and titles.