Lady Ogram, who was on the lookout in these latter years for struggling merit or talent which she could assist, interested herself in the son of a poor woman of Shawe, a boy who had won a scholarship at Hollingford School, and seemed full of promise.  Being about sixteen, the lad had a great desire to enter a bank, and Lady Ogram put his case before the senior partner in the chief Hollingford banking-house, who was no other than Mr. Robb himself.  Thus recommended, the boy soon had his wish; he was admitted to a clerkship.  But less than six months proved him so unsuitable a member of the establishment that he received notice of dismissal.  Not till after this step had been taken did Lady Ogram hear of it.  She was indignant at what seemed to her a lack of courtesy; she made inquiries, persuaded herself that her protege had been harshly dealt with, and wrote a very pungent letter to the head of the firm.  Mr. Robb did not himself reply, and the grave arguments urged by his subordinate served nothing to mitigate Lady Ogram’s wrath.  Insult had been added to injury; her ladyship straightway withdrew an account she kept at the bank, and dispatched to the M. P. a second letter, so forcible in its wording that it received no answer at all.

Never half-hearted in her quarrels, Lady Ogram made known to all her acquaintances in the neighbourhood the opinion she had of Mr. Robb, and was in no wise discouraged when it came to her ears that the banker M. P. spoke of taking legal proceedings against her.  It happened that Mr. Robb about this time addressed an important meeting of his constituents.  His speech was not brilliant, and Lady Ogram made great fun of the newspaper report.  He reminded her, she said, of a specially stupid organ-grinder, grinding all out of time the vulgarest and most threadbare tunes.  Henceforth, applying the name of a character in Dickens, she spoke of Hollingford’s representative as Robb the Grinder; which, when Mr. Robb heard of it, as of course he did very soon, by no means sweetened his disposition towards “the termagant of Rivenoak”—­a phrase he was supposed to have himself invented.  “I’ll grind her!” remarked the honourable gentleman, in the bosom of his family, and before long he found his opportunity.  In the next parliamentary recess, he again spoke at Hollingford, this time at a festal meeting of the Conservative Club, where the gentility of town and district was well represented.  His subject was the British Aristocracy, its glories in the past, its honours in the present, and the services it would render in a future dark with revolutionary menace.  The only passage which had any particular meaning, or to which anyone listened, ran pretty much thus: