One afternoon, however, she received disagreeable letters, which had a disastrous influence on Letitia’s temper. They were letters about Ralph. She had not very much communication nowadays with her old home. Mr. Ravelstone of Grocombe and his sons had no habit of writing. There was not a woman in the family save the wife of the second brother, who had married a housemaid, and naturally she did not attempt to correspond with her sister-in-law. But on this occasion old Mr. Ravelstone wrote, and Willie Ravelstone wrote, and there was a letter from Ralph. Why did you send him here? the father and brother asked in tones of despair. Why didn’t you make him go back? While Ralph himself wrote with jaunty familiarity and sent his love to Frogmore, who he said was a jolly old cock, and to whom he meant to write very soon. Letitia was irritated beyond description by these letters. Her sense of superiority to her own family was great, and to be thus called to account by them was intolerable. And Ralph’s boisterous nonsense and his bravado about Lord Frogmore drove her to a kind of frenzy. She turned, as was natural, upon the only person she could assail with the most perfect impunity, upon Mary, at whose head she had almost flung Ralph’s letter. The letters came to Greenpark in the afternoon. The gentlemen were all out, or so she thought, and there was no restraint upon the mistress of the house. The drawing-room was a double room, one within the other. And as ill luck would have it Lord Frogmore had retired to the inner portion with the newspaper before his sister-in-law came in. She had taken back Ralph’s letter from Mary, who followed her into the drawing-room, and now flung it on the table with an exclamation of disgust. “I do not believe,” she said, “that he would ever have come here at all, Mary Hill, but for you. It was you who took him in, and instead of telling him, which was the best possible excuse, that the house was full, though you knew it was, fairly to the door: and I had to get up a story about the covers to make room for Frogmore, whom it’s of so much importance to keep well with: instead of getting rid of him in this way with just a simple story--_and true_--you gave him your own room--your own room! determined at any risk you’d have him here. What for, in the name of goodness? For you couldn’t marry him--though, indeed, one can never tell what a woman will be silly enough to do.” “You know, Letitia,” said Mary, deeply wounded, and with some vehemence, “I would not marry your brother--not if he had everything the world could give.” “You say that now--when you know that he is not in that mind: but you were not of the same opinion then. You gave him your own room that you mightn’t have to send him away.” “Oh, Letitia,” said Mary, “you have always put people in my room when there was any crowding. You have done it twenty times. It seemed so rational: and how was I to know? Your own brother----”