A Woman's War by Warwick Deeping

Porteus Carmagee, the lawyer, and his sister lived in Lombard Street, in a grim, blind-eyed, stuccoed house with laurels in tubs before it, and chains and posts defending an arid stretch of shingle. There was something about the house that suggested law, a dry and close-mouthed look that was wholly on the surface. Porteus Carmagee was a little man, who forever seemed spluttering and fuming under some grievance. He was hardly to be met without an irritable explosion against his own physical afflictions, the delinquencies of tradesmen and Radicals, or the sins of the boy who brought the morning paper. The lawyer's almost truculent attitude towards the world was largely the result of "liver"; his sourness was on the surface; one glimpse of him cutting capers with Kate Murchison's children would dissipate the notion that he was a cadaverous and crusty hater of mankind.

Miss Phyllis Carmagee was remarkable for the utter unfitness of her Christian name, and for the divine placidity that contrasted with her brother's waspishness. A big, moon-faced, ponderous woman, she was a rock of composure, a species of human banyan-tree under whose blessed branches a hundred fretful mortals might rest in the shade. Her detractors, and they were few, asserted that she was a mere mass of amiable and phlegmatic fat. Miss Carmagee was blessed with a very happy sense of humor; she had a will of her own, a will that was formidable by reason of its stubborn inertia when once it had come to rest.