The house is now a good deal altered and differently numbered, a portion of it having been destroyed in one of the 1917 air-raids, when the Marylebone Road was strewn with its broken glass for twenty yards.  But in the winter of 1901-2 and onwards till 1914 it was a noted centre of social intercourse between Society and Science.  The Rossiters were well enough off—­he made quite two thousand a year out of his professorial work and his books, and her income which was L5,000 when she first married had risen to L9,000 after they had been married ten years; through the increase in value of Leeds town property.  Mrs. Rossiter had had two children, but were both dead, her facile tears were dried, she satisfied her maternal instinct by the keeping of three pug dogs which her husband secretly detested.  She also had a scarlet-and-blue macaw and two cockatoos and a Persian cat; but these last her husband liked or tolerated for their colour or their biological interest; only, as in the case of the dogs, he objected (though seldom angrily, out of consideration for his wife’s feelings) to their being so messily and inopportunely fed.

Linda Rossiter was liable to lose her pets as she had lost her two children by alternating days of forgetfulness with weeks of lavish over-attention.  But as she readily gave way to tears on the least remonstrance, Michael in the course of eleven years of married life remonstrated as little as possible.  A clever, tactful parlour-maid and two good housemaids, a manservant who was devoted to the “professor” and a taxidermist who assisted him in his experiments did the rest in keeping the big house tolerably tidy and presentable.  Rossiter himself was too intent on the stars, the gases of decomposition, the hidden processes of life, miscegenation in star-fish, microbic diseases in man, beasts, birds and bees, the glands of the throat, the suprarenal capsules and the chemical origin of life to care much for aesthetics, for furniture and house decoration.  He was the third son of an impoverished Northumbrian squire who on his part cared only for the more barbarous field-sports, and when he could take his mind off them believed that at some time and place unspecified Almighty God had dictated the English bible word for word, had established the English Church and had scrupulously prescribed the functions and limitations of woman.  His wife—­Michael Rossiter’s tenderly-loved mother—­had died from a neglected prolapsus of the womb, and the old rambling house in Northumberland situated in superb scenery, had in its furniture grown more and more hideous to the eye as early and mid-Victorian fashions and ideals receded and modern taste shook itself free from what was tawdry, fluffy, stuffy, floppy, messy, cheaply imitative, fringed and tasselled and secretive.