majestic carriage; and had moreover a voice sufficiently powerful to keep
order in an Irish brigade, or to command a vessel in a storm without the
assistance of a trumpet. Mr. Porkington, on the other hand, was a
little, dry, pale, plain man, with an abstracted and nervous manner, and
a voice that had never grown up so as to match even the little body from
which it came, but was a sort of cracked treble whisper. Moreover, when
Mrs. Porkington wished to speak her mind to her husband, she would
recline upon a sofa in an impressive manner, and fix her eyes upon the
ceiling. Mr. Porkington, on these occasions, would sit on the very edge
of the most uncomfortable chair, his toes turned out, his hands embracing
his knees, and his eyes tracing the patterns upon the carpet, as though
with a view of studying some abstruse theory of curves. On which side
the victory lay under these circumstances it is easy to guess.

Mrs. Porkington felt the advantage of her position and followed it up.

"I never, my dear, mention any subject to you, but you immediately fling
your parents at me."

Mr. Porkington would as soon have thought of throwing St. Paul's
Cathedral.

After a honeymoon spent in the Lake district the happy pair went to pay a
visit to the parents of the bridegroom, and Porkington had so brightened
and revived during his stay there, and had expressed himself so happy in
their society, that Mrs. Porkington could not forgive him. In the
company of his wife's father, on the contrary, he relapsed into a state
bordering upon coma; and no wonder, for that worthy retired tallow
merchant was a perfect specimen of ponderous pomposity, and had
absolutely nothing in common with the shy scholar who had become his son-
in-law. Mr. Candlish had lost the great part of the money he had made by
tallow, and by consequence had nothing to give his daughter; but she
behaved herself as a woman should whose father might at one time have
given her ten thousand pounds. "My papa, my dear, was worth at least
40,000 pounds when he retired," was the form in which Mrs. Porkington
flung her surviving parent at the head of her husband, and crushed him
flat with the missile. To the world at large she spoke of her father as
"being at present a gentleman of moderate means." Now, as a gentleman of
moderate means cannot be expected to provide for a sister of no means at
all; and as Mrs. Porkington, not having been blessed with children by her
marriag