In another age, the scenes between Mrs. Lupin and Mrs. Chump, greatly significant for humanity as they are, will be given without offence on one side or martyrdom on the other.  At present, and before our sentimentalists are a concrete, it would be profitless rashness to depict them.  When the great shots were fired off (Mrs. Chump being requested to depart, and refusing) Mrs. Lupin fluttered between the belligerents, doing her best to be a medium for the restoration of peace.  In repeating Mrs. Chump’s remarks, which were rendered purposely strong with Irish spice by that woman, she choked; and when she conveyed to Mrs. Chump the counter-remarks of the ladies, she provoked utterances that almost killed her.  A sadder life is not to be imagined.  The perpetual irritation of a desire to indulge in her mortal weakness, and listening to the sleepless conscience that kept watch over it; her certainty that it would be better for her to laugh right out, and yet her incapacity to contest the justice of her nieces’ rebuke; her struggle to resist Mrs. Chump, which ended in a sensation of secret shameful liking for her—­all these warring influences within were seen in her behaviour.

“I have always said,” observed Cornelia, “that she labours under a disease.”  What is more, she had always told Mrs. Lupin as much, and her sisters had echoed her.  Three to one in such a case is a severe trial to the reason of solitary one.  And Mrs. Lupin’s case was peculiar, inasmuch as the more she yielded to Chump-temptation and eased her heart of its load of laughter, the more her heart cried out against her and subscribed to the scorn of her nieces.  Mrs. Chump acted a demon’s part; she thirsted for Mrs. Lupin that she might worry her.  Hitherto she had not known that anything peculiar lodged in her tongue, and with no other person did she think of using it to produce a desired effect; but now the scenes in Brookfield became hideous to the ladies, and not wanting in their trials to the facial muscles of the gentlemen.  A significant sign of what the ladies were enduring was, that they ceased to speak of it in their consultations.  It is a blank period in the career of young creatures when a fretting wretchedness forces them out of their dreams to action; and it is then that they will do things that, seen from the outside (i.e. in the conduct of others), they would hold to be monstrous, all but impossible.  Or how could Cornelia persuade herself, as she certainly persuaded Sir Twickenham and the world about her, that she had a contemplative pleasure in his society?  Arabella drew nearer to Edward Buxley, whom she had not treated well, and who, as she might have guessed, had turned his thoughts toward Adela; though clearly without encouragement.  Adela indeed said openly to her sisters, with a Gallic ejaculation, “Edward follows me, do you know; and he has adopted a sort of Sicilian-vespers look whenever he meets me with Captain Gambier.  I could forgive him if he would draw out a dagger and be quite theatrical; but, behold, we meet, and my bourgeois grunts and stammers, and seems to beg us to believe that he means nothing whatever by his behaviour.  Can you convey to his City-intelligence that he is just a trifle ill-bred?”