“Aunt Poynder goes down into the arena for me, and fights with wild beasts in the kitchen,” the ungrateful young woman used to say. “She likes it, I verily believe.--But some of their roughness rubs off on her,” she would add, and nobody would gainsay her. Mrs. Poynder was the professed Disagreeable Woman of Newcastle, and people were apt to fly up side alleys and into shops when they saw her come sailing majestically down Granger Street. “Oh, Mortimer, why did you go and have such awful relations?” Mrs. Elles exclaimed casually to her husband, one afternoon, when she came back from a visit to Egidia at Jesmond. She was impelled to say it. Mrs. Poynder’s coarseness and Charles’ roughness seemed now-a-days more obtrusive by contrast with the pleasant manners of the people with whom, by the accident of her friendship with Egidia, she had been almost daily thrown into contact. This had been her farewell visit. Egidia was going back to town; but, in the course of many and many a long talk, she had sown a plentiful crop of ideas in this wayward head--a seed whose harvest was to prove a very different one to that which she had expected. Mortimer Elles was not seriously discomposed by his wife’s remark. “That’s a nice remark to make to a man!” was his not ungentle rejoinder. He had ceased to expect Phœbe to curb any expression of opinion out of respect to his feelings, and in return permitted himself his full measure of brutality towards her. “Well, aren’t they?” she repeated, yawning; “when is Charles going to pass his examination and relieve us of his presence? I did not bargain for Charles as a permanent lodger when I married you, nor Aunt Poynder indeed, for that matter, but I suppose all is for the worst, in this dreariest of all possible households!” She expected no answer. These two always wrangled at cross purposes. There was very seldom a positive engagement between them. Mrs. Elles knew that Charles could not leave just yet, knew, too, that Mrs. Poynder would never go, was not positively sure that she wanted her to go, but just now, when her normal state of discontent was quadrupled by the new influences that had lately come into her life, she could not resist a repetition of an oft-repeated complaint. She went on in a soft but irritating voice. “I have no objection to Aunt Poynder’s engaging all the servants and managing them, but I must say I wish she would let Jane alone. I have reserved the right of choosing my own parlour-maid, and when I have succeeded in getting one that suits me, I don’t want her bullied and the place made impossible for her.” “Who bullies her? An idle, good-for-nothing trollop of a creature.” “There, you see, you don’t like her.” “No, I don’t,” he replied brutally. “I don’t like her style. She copies you, and you’re not a particularly good model.” “Ah, how miserable I am!” she exclaimed, irrelevantly. “Mortimer, tell me, why can’t we get on? It is not my fault, is it?”