Her only unmarried daughter, Lady Julia, lived with her ladyship. Poor Lady Julia had suffered early from a spine disease, which had kept her for many years to her couch. Being always at home, and under her mother’s eyes, she was the old lady’s victim, her pincushion, into which Lady Kew plunged a hundred little points of sarcasm daily. As children are sometimes brought before magistrates, and their poor little backs and shoulders laid bare, covered with bruises and lashes which brutal parents have inflicted, so, I dare say, if there had been any tribunal or judge, before whom this poor patient lady’s heart could have been exposed, it would have been found scarred all over with numberless ancient wounds, and bleeding from yesterday’s castigation. Old Lady Kew’s tongue was a dreadful thong which made numbers of people wince. She was not altogether cruel, but she knew the dexterity with which she wielded her lash, and liked to exercise it. Poor Lady Julia was always at hand, when her mother was minded to try her powers. Lady Kew had just made herself comfortable at Brighton, when her little grandson’s illness brought Lady Anne Newcome and her family down to the sea. Lady Kew was almost scared back to London again, or blown over the water to Dieppe. She had never had the measles. “Why did not Anne carry the child to some other place? Julia, you will on no account go and see that little pestiferous swarm of Newcomes, unless you want to send me out of the world—which I dare say you do, for I am a dreadful plague to you, I know, and my death would be a release to you.” “You see Doctor H., who visits the child every day,” cries poor Pincushion; “you are not afraid when he comes.” “Doctor H.? Doctor H. comes to cure me, or to tell me the news, or to flatter me, or to feel my pulse and to pretend to prescribe, or to take his guinea; of course Dr. H. must go to see all sorts of people in all sorts of diseases. You would not have me be such a brute as to order him not to attend my own grandson? I forbid you to go to Anne’s house. You will send one of the men every day to inquire. Let the groom go—yes, Charles—he will not go into the house. He will ring the bell and wait outside. He had better ring the bell at the area—I suppose there is an area—and speak to the servants through the bars, and bring us word how Alfred is.” Poor Pincushion felt fresh compunctions; she had met the children, and kissed the baby, and held kind Ethel’s hand in hers, that day, as she was out in her chair. There was no use, however, to make this confession. Is she the only good woman or man of whom domestic tyranny has made a hypocrite?