The woman came in first, with the man she called Benjamin at her heels, and set the candle on the mantel-piece. Trottle takes leave to describe her as an offensively-cheerful old woman, awfully lean and wiry, and sharp all over, at eyes, nose, and chin — devilishly brisk, smiling, and restless, with a dirty false front and a dirty black cap, and short fidgetty arms, and long hooked finger-nails — an unnaturally lusty old woman, who walked with a spring in her wicked old feet, and spoke with a smirk on her wicked old face — the sort of old woman (as Trottle thinks) who ought to have lived in the dark ages, and been ducked in a horse-pond, instead of flourishing in the nineteenth century, and taking charge of a Christian house.
“You’ll please to excuse my son, Benjamin, won’t you, sir?” says this witch without a broomstick, pointing to the man behind her, propped against the bare wall of the dining-room, exactly as he had been propped against the bare wall of the passage. “He’s got his inside dreadful bad again, has my son Benjamin. And he won’t go to bed, and he will follow me about the house, up-stairs and downstairs, and in my lady’s chamber, as the song says, you know. It’s his indisgestion, poor dear, that sours his temper and makes him so agravating — and indisgestion is a wearing thing to the best of us, ain’t it, sir?”
“Ain’t it, sir?” chimes in agravating Benjamin, winking at the candle-light like an owl at the sunshine.