Reduced once more to demonstrate like schoolgirls by this woman, the ladies rose together, and were retiring, when Mrs. Chump swung round and caught Arabella’s hand.  “See heer,” she motioned to Wilfrid.  Arabella made a bitter effort to disengage herself.  “See, now!  It’s jeal’sy of me, Mr. Wilfrud, becas I’m a widde and just an abom’nation to garls, poor darlin’s!  And twenty shindies per dime we’ve been havin’, and me such a placable body, if ye’ll onnly let m’ explode.  I’m all powder, avery bit! and might ha’ been christened Saltpetre, if born a boy.  She hasn’t so much as a shot to kill a goose, says Chump, poor fella!  But he went, annyway.  I must kiss somebody when I talk of ’m.  Mr. Wilfrud, I’ll take the girls, and entitle myself to you.”

Arabella was the first victim.  Her remonstrance was inarticulate.  Cornelia’s “Madam!” was smothered.  Adela behaved better, being more consciously under Wilfrid’s eye; she prepared her pocket-handkerchief, received the salute, and deliberately effaced it.

“There!” said Mrs. Chump; “duty to begin with.  And now for you, Mr. Wilfrud.”

The ladies escaped.  Their misery could not be conveyed to the mind.  The woman was like a demon come among them.  They felt chiefly degraded, not by her vulgarity, but by their inability to cope with it, and by the consequent sickening sense of animal inefficiency—­the block that was put to all imaginative delight in the golden hazy future they figured for themselves, and which was their wine of life.  An intellectual adversary they could have combated; this huge brogue-burring engine quite overwhelmed them.  Wilfrid’s worse than shameful behaviour was a common rallying-point; and yet, so absolutely critical were they by nature, their blame of him was held mentally in restraint by the superior ease of his manner as contrasted with their own lamentably silly awkwardness.  Highly civilized natures do sometimes, and keen wits must always, feel dissatisfied when they are not on the laughing side:  their dread of laughter is an instinctive respect for it.

Dinner brought them all together again.  Wilfrid took his father’s seat, facing his Aunt Lupin, and increased the distress of his sisters by his observance of every duty of a host to the dreadful intruder, whom he thus established among them.  He was incomprehensible.  His visit to Stornley had wrought in him a total change.  He used to like being petted, and would regard everything as right that his sisters did, before he went there; and was a languid, long-legged, indifferent cavalier, representing men to them:  things made to be managed, snubbed, admired, but always virtually subservient and in the background.  Now, without perceptible gradation, his superiority was suddenly manifest; so that, irritated and apprehensive as they were, they could not, by the aid of any of their intricate mental machinery, look down on him.  They tried to; they tried hard to think him despicable as well