“Yes, but I never implied that women found it impossible to fall in love with him!” answered Egidia, quite gravely. “He is handsome and indifferent, and I know of no combination more dangerous to the peace of our sex!”
. . . . . . . .
Mrs. Elles’ little dinner was arranged; the invitations, written on beautiful rough note paper with an artistic ragged edge, sent out. Mrs. Elles had conscientiously consulted her husband’s list of engagements and saw that he was free, and put down a large cross for the eleventh. Mortimer would see that he was engaged, and would, as usual, be too lazy or careless to enquire further. On the evening in question, he would necessarily see “what was up,” and would grumblingly admit that he was “let in for one of Phœbe’s confounded dinners” instead of a happy gathering at the Continental Club with the “fellows.”
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.
“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.