His wife would, of course, have got on far better without him, as far as the success of her party was concerned, only society so far considers the husband, even if his social capacities are nil, as a necessary adjunct to the dinner table. He has not yet gone out with the épergne, and therefore must be tolerated. But with regard to Mrs. Poynder and Charles, the mistress of the house had put her foot down. She was famous for her little dinners, the entrain of which the presence of her husband did not seem, so far, to have materially diminished. But that of the other two would have been fatally destructive of charm. The pair had been induced to see the matter in somewhat of the same light--four members of a family were a little overwhelming--and the question of economy had weight with Mrs. Poynder. Aunt and nephew were in the habit of considerately inviting themselves out to high tea at the house of a relation of Mortimer’s in Newcastle on these occasions. Mrs. Poynder, indeed, owned to a want of sympathy with the “people Fibby contrived to get together,” and she was not informed that Miss Giles, for whom she had developed an unaccountable fancy, was to be of the party. “My old woman of the sea,” so Mrs. Elles sometimes spoke of her to her intimates, in whose eyes the ways and speeches of the terrible old lady amply justified the want of reticence implied in her niece’s indiscreet sobriquet. Why must she form part of the Elles household? Everybody wondered, but Mrs. Elles knew. For on this point the husband was immutable. He saw plainly that on Mrs. Poynder did his manly bourgeois comfort depend. His wife only attended to the show side of housekeeping; she saw that there was always plenty of flowers in the drawing-room, winter and summer--but Mrs. Poynder attended to his shirts and their proper complement of buttons. Mrs. Elles ordered dinner, but Mrs. Poynder kept the books and interviewed the tradesmen. His wife paid the smart calls, but Mrs. Poynder looked up his dull and important relations, and, in her rough undiplomatic way, advanced his affairs. She exercised a certain modest supervision over the whisky bottle, and without saying much, curbed Mortimer’s drunken tendencies a good deal. Mrs. Elles herself was vaguely cognizant of the advantages of this system, and realized that Mrs. Poynder’s presence in the ménage gave her leisure to attend to the cultivation of the graces of her own mind and person, and exonerated her from the thankless task of confronting Mortimer on the tedious matters of servants, wages, and housekeeping and partial abstention.