CHAPTER VI.
THE ROSSITERS The Rossiters' house in Park Crescent was at the northern end of Portland Place, and its high-walled garden--the stables that were afterwards to become a garage--and Michael Rossiter's long, glass-roofed studio-laboratory--abutted on one of those quiet, deadly-respectable streets at the back that are called after Devon or Dorset place names.
The house is now a good deal altered 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.