She was a little woman, sallow and thin, with a face which in any one less than the mistress of Mardenholme would have been insignificant. But she had fine eyes and teeth, and dressed with the exquisite taste of a woman who studied the fitness of things and not the fashion-book. She had a manner that was at once stately and caressing, and could confer a favour with the air of a princess of the blood royal. She had spent all her life in society, and, except when she slept, knew not what it was to be alone. She could have had but scanty leisure for reading, yet she knew, or seemed to know, everything that society knew. Her detractors declared that she never read anything but the newspapers, and thus, by a zealous study of the _Times_ and the critical journals, kept herself far in advance of those stupid people who wade through books. She skimmed the cream of other people’s knowledge, shrugged her shoulders in mild depreciation of books she had never read, and wore the newest shades of opinion as she wore the newest colours. For the rest, she was of an uncertain age, had been in society for about a quarter of a century, and looked five-and-thirty. Her light-brown hair, which she wore with almost classic simplicity, as yet revealed no tell-tale streak of silver. Perhaps, like Mr. Mivers in _Kenelm Chillingly_, Lady Baker had begun her wig early. Sir Horatio Veering Baker, the husband of this distinguished personage, was rather an appanage of her state than an entity. She produced him on ceremonial occasions, just as her butler produced the parcel-gilt tankards and gigantic rosewater salvers on the buffet; and at other times he retired, like the moon on those dark nights when earth knows not her gentle splendour. He was a mild-faced old man, who devoted his days to various ologies, in which no one but himself and his old servant seemed to take the faintest interest—and the servant only pretended. He inhabited, for the most part, a distant wing of the mansion, where he had a vast area of glass cases for the display of those specimens which illustrated his ologies, and represented the labour of his life. Sometimes, but not always, he appeared at the bottom of his dinner table; and when, among her ladyship’s guests, a scientific man perchance appeared, Sir Horatio did him homage, and carried him off after dinner for an inspection of the specimens. Lady Baker was amiably tolerant of her husband’s hobbies. She received him with unvarying graciousness when he hobbled into her drawing-room in his dress-coat and antique tie, looking hardly less antediluvian than the petrified jawbone of a megatherium, which was one of the gems in his collection; and she was politely solicitous for his well-being when he pronounced himself ‘a little fagged,’ and preferred to dine in his study.