She was anxious to be civil to a young man of whom Michael thought so highly.

She sympathized with his regret that they had no children, but why could he not take up with one of her cousin Bennet's boys from Manchester, or Sophy's son from Northallerton, or one of his own brother's or sister's children?
How on earth did he become acquainted with this young man from South Wales?
But she was determined not to be separated in any way from her husband, and so she sat with them as often and as long as she could in the library.

The studio-laboratory she could not stand with its horrid smell of chemicals; she also dreaded vaguely that vivisection went on there--Michael of course had a license, though he was far too tender-hearted to torture sentient creatures.

Still he did odd things with frogs and rats and goats and monkeys; and her dread was that she might one day burst in on one of these sacrifices to science and see a transformed Michael, blood-stained, wielding a knife and dangerous if interrupted in his pursuit of a discovery.
But as the long talks and conferences of the two friends--really not so far separated in age as one of them thought--generally took place in the library, she assisted at a large proportion of them.

Rossiter would not have had it otherwise, though to David she was at times excessively irksome.