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 ramblin