The young women, innocent of that courtesy to servants which makes of service an honourable act, were at constant and undignified bickering and war with those beneath them; and as they held always the winning card of dismissal, they never realized that the sullen obedience of the world below stairs was as insulting as open insolence; they still less realized that these sullen flunkies took revenge in spoliation, and that what remained of deference was a mockery and covert contempt. So it came about that the sneaks amongst the servants held the lower quarters of the house in their hands. The young women now began to have social aspirations. They had a vague idea that there was some strange pleasure to be got in the mixing with and being seen with those who but gave them chill encouragement to friendship. But as it so chanced, their ambition for they knew not quite what, was fed by the sudden eagerness of women of high social position to trespass on the broad pages and in the social gossip of the columns of the widely read newspaper which Pompey Malahide held at his beck and will--a newspaper which diffused raucous opinions and created the thoughts of millions throughout the country. The girls found themselves courted. Their arrogance grew, and their strut and swagger increased. Malahide dined at great houses. With the master-will of Doome to advise him, Malahide now found his position still further strengthened by the alliance with and friendship of his boy Horace, who had left Harrow and was going up to Oxford. His baffled affection for his girls turned to a passionate pride in his handsome son; and the boy, frank, honest, golden, gay, debonair, returned the old man’s affection, drilled him in the subtleties with gentleness, and watched over his father like a father. The young fellow, with an astuteness that promised well for the rise of his house, was spending the summer with a Magdalen undergraduate, an old Harrow schoolfellow--a young lord whose father was in the Cabinet; in fact, Horace, with airy cheerfulness, was cementing friendships that might be of value to his father in the political life which he was contemplating for himself, and later on for his son. The millionaire hungered for the lad; and, in his absence, he poured into Betty’s ears all his hopes for him, his pride in him, his affection for him. And it was good to see that his pride in the lad’s aristocratic ways was wholly undamped by any suspicion that the boy despised him--whereas with his girls he felt their despisings at every turn. Betty had hoped, for his father’s sake, that the youth would come home for a few days before his term began at Oxford; but when he came she endured her severest trial.