“Oh! no,” he replied ironically. “You are always in the right. There is nothing more tiresome in a woman.” “You are frank, Mortimer, and almost epigrammatic!” “Shut up, can’t you?” he exclaimed, in accents of annoyance. “I wonder why it is that you always contrive to rub me up the wrong way. Here you are abusing me--abusing my relations--why can’t you let them alone? I don’t abuse yours.” “Mine are all dead!” she said, pathetically. “Fair game for you!” “And a nice lot they were!” said the man, now thoroughly roused to ill-temper. “That is, if you have told me the truth about them. You’re pretty good at drawing the long bow, you know.” At this point in the discussion, Mrs. Elles withdrew. Her relations were--or had been--a weak point, and Mortimer had suffered--in his purse--from claims of a ne’er-do-well father-in-law, and a foolish, extravagant mother. Phœbe had been brought up badly as a child, had been neglected in her girlhood, and her marriage with Mortimer Elles had been the making of her--as her people said, and as she had agreed at the time--but it was a grievance with her that, try as she might, she could not give her history a romantic turn in her husband’s eyes. He knew all about her, was full of preconceived notions about her, and she resented the impossibility of keeping up a consistent pose with him, being one of those who reverse the proverb and expect to be heroes to their valets de chambre and heroines to their husbands. This weakness of hers entailed the other weakness to which her husband had alluded--her consistent ambiguity of phrase, her frequent lapses from truth. These lapses were for the most part unconscious, they were the good face she put on every matter, her artistic presentment of incidents relating to herself and other people, for, to do her justice, she applied the same method to her fellow-creatures, and was never known to retail a spiteful or unpicturesque version of another woman’s affairs. She considered herself the soul of honour, it is true; she literally would not have told a lie to save her life; but to save her pose and her dramatic presentment from discomfiture, she shrank from no form of embellishment or extenuation. So she “doctored” facts--served up the plain “roast and boiled” of everyday existence with a sauce piquante of her own devising, and thought of herself as one who, compassing under difficulties the whole duty of woman, makes herself as charming, as romantic, as mysterious as circumstances will allow. * * * * * Half an hour later she looked into the study, where Mortimer was sitting, a revolting picture of middle-class ease, with his legs on the table, drinking whisky and water. “I thought I heard someone crying?” “So you did. Jane. I have told her to go.” “What?” she screamed.