However, thank goodness, the next day’s post brought a letter directed to Edward, which being in a woman’s handwriting, I naturally opened, and found to my delight that Mrs. Yapp regretted to say that she couldn’t be with “her pet” until that day week; so that, as Edward was coming home on the Thursday, he could receive the old thing himself, and take that load off my hands at any rate. Well, on the Thursday home came Edward. Directly I heard his knock, I snatched up a duster and began rubbing down the hall chairs, so that he might not find a speck of dust in the house on his return; and I was quite glad to see that my exertions were not thrown away upon him, for he told me, that it was very wrong of me in my state to go fatiguing myself in that way, and that he wished I would make the servant do it. On which I said that if he expected Susan to take any pride about the look of the furniture he was mightily mistaken, and he would find himself eaten up alive in less than no time, if I wasn’t continually slaving myself to death for him as I was. Edward was in quite a good humour, for he had won his cause like a clever lawyer, as he certainly is, though, as he said, all the facts, and the law, and justice of the case, were dead against him. So, when I broke to him the impending calamity of Mrs. Yapp’s visit, he took it much better than I had expected, for he laughed, and said he should like to see how old Mother Yapp and Mrs. B--ff--n would get on with one another; for he expected they would come together like two highly-charged thunder-clouds, and go off with a tremendous explosion, which would have the effect of clearing the air of his house, so that he would be left in a perfect heaven. And then the jocular monster tittered, and said that if he had been doomed to have only one mother-in-law, it was clear that he must have ended his days in a madhouse, but that as Providence had blessed him with two, he was as happy as a man who had married an orphan; for as mothers-in-law were the invariable negatives of domestic happiness, it was clear that two of them must make his home an affirmative paradise; adding that one was the poison and the other the antidote, so that, thank Heaven, now, if at any time he was suffering from an over-dose of mother-in-law B--ff--n, he had only to make up his mind to swallow a little of mother-in-law Yapp, and he would be all right again in no time; for the bitter alkali of the one would correct the acidity of the other, and drive off the dreadful effects of both in a twinkling. Then he went on giggling and railing at mothers-in-law in general, and at my dear mother, and the mother of his first wife, in particular, till I lost all patience with him; for he declared that a whole avalanche of treatises had been written on the origin of evil, and a mountain of rubbish shot into the British Museum about the cause of sorrow in this world; but it was very plain, and he