'A chit, ma'am, a chit,' said Mr Flawse. 'It means a young woman.'

'Not where I come from,' said Mrs Flawse. 'It has an altogether different meaning and a very nasty one.'

'I assure you I meant young, ma'am. The defecatory connotation which you attributed to the word was entirely absent from my intention.'

Mrs Flawse rather doubted that. What she had experienced of his intentions on their honeymoon gave her reason to think otherwise, but she had been prepared to suffer in a good cause. 'Whatever you intended, you still accused me of marrying you for your money. Now that I won't take from anyone.'

'Quite so, ma'am. It was said in the heat of the moment and in the humble consciousness that there had to be a more sufficient reason than my poor self. I retract the remark.'

'I'm glad to hear it. I married you because you were old and lonely and needed someone to look after you. The thought of money never entered my head.'

'Quite so,' said Mr Flawse, accepting these personally insulting attributes with some difficulty, 'as you say I am old and lonely and I need someone to look after me.'

'And I can't be expected to look after anyone with the present lack of amenities in the house. I want electricity and hot baths and television and central heating if I am to stay here.'

Mr Flawse nodded sadly. That it should have come to this. 'You shall have them, ma'am,' he said, 'you shall have them.'

'I didn't come here to catch my death of pneumonia. I want them installed at once.'

'I shall put the matter in hand immediately,' said Mr Flawse, 'and now let us adjourn to my study and the warmth of my fire to discuss the matter of my will.'

'Your will?' said Mrs Flawse. 'You did say "your will"?'

'Indeed I did, ma'am,' said the old man and escorted her down the steps of the gazebo and across the stunted garden to the house. There, sitting opposite one another in the great leather armchairs, with a mangy cat basking before the coal fire they continued their discussion.

'I will be frank with you,' said Mr Flawse. 'My grandson, your son-in-law, Lockhart is a bastard.'

'Really?' said Mrs Flawse, uncertain whether or not to give that word its literal meaning. The old man answered the question.

'The product of an illicit union between my late daughter and person or persons unknown, and I have made it my life's work to determine firstly his paternal ancestry and secondly to eradicate those propensities to which by virtue of his being partly a Flawse I have access. I trust you follow my line of reasoning.'

Mrs Flawse didn't but she nodded obediently.

'I am, as you may have surmised from a perusal of my library, a firm believer in the congenital inheritance of ancestral characteristics both physical and mental. To paraphrase the great William, there is a paternity that shapes our ends rough-hew them how we will. Paternity, ma'am. Not maternity. The mating of dogs, of which I have considerable experience, is a pointer to this end.'

Mrs Flawse shivered and stared wildly at him. If her ears did not deceive her, she had married a man with perversions beyond belief.

Mr Flawse ignored her stunned look and continued. "The female bitch when on heat,' he said, adding, 'I trust this somewhat indelicate subject does not offend you?' and taking Mrs Flawse's shaking head as an assurance that she wasn't in the least put out, went on, 'the female bitch on heat attracts the attention of a pack of males, which pack pursues her up hill and down dale fighting among themselves for the privilege accorded to the fiercest and strongest dog of fecundating her prima node. She is thus impregnated by the finest specimen first but to assure conception she is then served by all the other dogs in the pack down to the smallest and weakest. The result is the survival of the species, ma'am, and of the fittest. Darwin said it, ma'am, and Darwin was right. Now I am an hereditarist. The Flawse nose and the Flawse chin are physical proof of the inheritance over the centuries of physical attributes evolved from our Flawse forefathers and it is my firm conviction that we not only inherit physical characteristics by way of paternal ancestry but also mental ones. To put it another way, the dog is father to the man, and a dog's temperament is determined by his progenitors. But I see that you doubt me.'

He paused and studied Mrs Flawse closely; there was certainly doubt on her face. But it was doubt as to the sanity of the man she had married rather than an intellectual doubt of his argument.

'You say,' continued the old man, 'as well you may, if inheritance determines temperament what has education to do with what we are? Is that not what you are thinking?'

Again Mrs Flawse nodded involuntarily. Her own education had been so pasteurized by permissive parents and progressive teachers that she found it impossible to follow his argument at all. Beyond the fact that he seemed obsessed with the sexual habits and reproductive processes of dogs and had openly admitted that in the Flawse family a dog was evidently the father to the man, she had no idea what he was talking about.

'The answer is this, ma'am, and here again the dog is our determinant, a dog is a domestic animal not by nature but by social symbiosis. Dog and man, ma'am, live together by virtue of mutual necessity. We hunt together, we eat together, we live together and we sleep together, but above all we educate one another. I have learnt more from the constant companionship of dogs than ever I have from men or books. Carlyle is the exception but I will come to that later. First let me say that a dog can be trained. Up to a point, ma'am, only up to a point. I defy the finest shepherd in the world to take a terrier and turn him into a sheepdog. It can't be done. A terrier is an earth dog. Your Latin will have acquainted you with that. Terra, earth; terrier, earth dog. And no amount of herding will eradicate his propensity for digging. Train him how you will he will remain a digger of holes at heart. He may not dig but the instinct is there. and so it is with man, ma'am. Which said, it remains only to say that I have done with Lockhart my utmost to eradicate those instincts which we Flawses to our cost possess.'

'I'm glad to hear it,' muttered Mrs Flawse, who knew to her cost those instincts the Flawses possessed. The old man raised an admonitory finger. 'But, ma'am, lacking a knowledge of his father's ancestry I have been handicapped. Aye, sorely handicapped. The vein of vice that runs in Lockhart's paternal line I know not and knowing not can but deduce. My daughter could by no stretch of the imagination be described as a discriminating girl. The manner of her death suffices to prove that. She died, ma'am, behind a dyke giving birth to her son. And she refused to name the father.'

Mr Flawse paused to savour his frustration and to expel that nagging suspicion that his daughter's obstinacy in the matter of Lockhart's paternity was a final gesture of filial generosity designed to spare him the ignominy of incest. While he stared into the depths of the fire as into hell itself, Mrs Flawse contented herself with the realization that Lockhart's illegitimacy was one more arrow to the bow of her domestic power. The old fool would suffer for the admission. Mrs Flawse had garnered a fresh grievance.

'When I think that my Jessica is married to an illegitimate man, I must say I find your behaviour inexcusable and dishonourable, I do indeed,' she said taking advantage of Mr Flawse's mood of submission. 'If I had known I would never have given consent to the marriage.'

Mr Flawse nodded humbly. 'You must forgive me,' he said, 'but needs must when the devil drives and your daughter's saint-liness will dilute the evil of Lockhart's paternal line.'

'I sincerely hope so,' said 'Mrs Flawse. 'And talking about inheritance I believe you mentioned remaking your will.' And so from things theoretical they moved to practicalities. I will send for my solicitor, Mr Bullstrode, and have him draw up the new will. You will be the beneficiary, ma'am. I assure you of that. Within the limits imposed by my obligations to my employees, of course, and with the proviso that on your demise the estate will go to Lockhart and his offspring.'