Sir Vernon, seeing very little of Mowser, and knowing that she was a devoted nurse to his beloved elder daughter, had troubled himself very little about such complaints of her ‘tempers’ as from time to time reached his ears. He discouraged all fault-finding in his sister upon principle. So long as everything in the house, which concerned himself and his own comfort, went on velvet, he was unaffected by the fact that the servants made themselves disagreeable to other people. It was no matter to him that Spicer had been abominably impertinent to Aunt Rhoda in the morning, provided his dinner were well cooked in the evening. Nor did Rhoda’s raven croakings about the profligate wastefulness of his household distress him. He knew what he was spending, and that his expenses were so nearly on a level with his income that he always seemed poor: but though he liked to growl and grumble after every inspection of his banker’s book, he hated to be worried about pounds of butter, and quarts of milk, and dozens of eggs, by his sister. ‘If you pretend to keep my house, Rhoda, you must keep it quietly, and not plague me about these disgusting details,’ he said savagely; whereat Rhoda shrugged her elegant shoulders, and protested that if her brother liked to be cheated it was of course no business of hers to step in between him and the depredators. ‘I don’t like to be cheated, but I like still less to be worried,’ said Sir Vernon decisively; and Rhoda was wise enough to carry on the struggle no longer. She had her own comfort and her own advantage to consider, and she troubled her brother no further about domestic difficulties: but she carried on her war with the enemy vigorously notwithstanding—fiercest of all with Mowser, who looked upon Miss Lawford as the very head and front of the antelope tribe. Mowser was a servant of the old school. She prided herself upon the manners and habits of a past generation. She wore corkscrew ringlets, and a cap trimmed with real Buckinghamshire lace—none of your Nottingham machine-made stuff for Mowser. Her petticoats were short and scanty, and her side-laced cashmere boots were a relic of the past. She wore an ostentatious gold chain round her neck, and a portly silver watch at her side. She was rarely seen without a black-silk apron, which rustled exceedingly. She was of a bony figure, her face sharp and angular, her eyes a cold hard-looking gray.