Her voice had something of a challenge and defiance in it. "I've been
looking at a house," she said. "Alice Carmel told me of it. It isn't in
Berkeley Square, but it's near it. It's rather good."
He met her eye. "That's--premature," he said.
"We can't go on living in this one."
"I won't go to another."
"But why?"
"I just won't."
"It isn't the money?"
"No," said Trafford, with sudden fierce resentment. "I've overtaken you
and beaten you there, Marjorie."
She stared at the harsh bitterness of his voice. She was about to speak
when the door opened, and Malcom ushered in Aunt Plessington and Uncle
Hubert. Husband and wife hung for a moment, and then realized their talk
was at an end....
Marjorie went forward to greet her aunt, careless now of all that once
stupendous Influence might think of her. She had long ceased to feel
even the triumph of victory in her big house, her costly, dignified
clothes, her assured and growing social importance. For five years Aunt
Plessington had not even ventured to advise; had once or twice admired.
All that business of Magnet was--even elaborately--forgotten....
Seven years of feverish self-assertion had left their mark upon both the
Plessingtons. She was leaner, more gauntly untidy, more aggressively
ill-dressed. She no longer dressed carelessly, she defied the world with
her clothes, waved her tattered and dingy banners in its face. Uncle
Hubert was no fatter, but in some queer way he had ceased to be thin.
Like so many people whose peripheries defy the manifest quaint purpose
of Providence, he was in a state of thwarted adiposity, and with all the
disconnectedness and weak irritability characteristic of his condition.
He had developed a number of nervous movements, chin-strokings,
cheek-scratchings, and incredulous pawings at his more salient features.
"Isn't it a lark?" began Aunt Plessington, with something like a note of
apprehension in her highpitched voice, and speaking almost from the
doorway, "we're making a call together. I and Hubert! It's an attack in
force."
Uncle Hubert goggled in the rear and stroked his chin, and tried to get
together a sort of facial expression.
The Traffords made welcoming noises, and Marjorie advanced to meet her
aunt.
"We want you to do something for us," said Aunt Plessington, taking two
hands with two hands....
In the intervening years the Movement had had ups and downs; it had had
a boom, which had ended abruptly in a complete loss of voice for Aunt
Plessington--she had tried to run it on a patent non-stimulating food,
and then it had entangled itself with a new cult of philanthropic
theosophy from which it had been extracted with difficulty and in a
damaged condition. It had never completely recovered from that unhappy
association. Latterly Aunt Plessington had lost her nerve, and she had
taken to making calls upon people with considerable and sometimes
embarrassing demand for support, urging them to join committees, take
chairs, stake reputations, speak and act as foils for her. If they
refused she lost her temper very openly and frankly, and became
industriously vindictive. She circulated scandals or created them. Her
old assurance had deserted her; the strangulated contralto was losing
its magic power, she felt, in this degenerating England it had ruled so
long. In the last year or so she had become extremely snappy with Uncle
Hubert. She ascribed much of the Movement's futility to the decline of
his administrative powers and the increasing awkwardness of his
gestures, and she did her utmost to keep him up to the mark. Her only
method of keeping him up to the mark was to jerk the bit. She had now
come to compel Marjorie to address a meeting that was to inaugurate a
new phase in the Movement's history, and she wanted Marjorie because she
particularly wanted a daring, liberal, and spiritually amorous bishop,
who had once told her with a note of profound conviction that Marjorie
was a very beautiful woman. She was so intent upon her purpose that she
scarcely noticed Trafford. He slipped from the room unobserved under
cover of her playful preliminaries, and went to the untidy little
apartment overhead which served in that house as his study. He sat down
at the big desk, pushed his methodically arranged papers back, and
drummed on the edge with his fingers.
"I'm damned if we have that bigger house," said Trafford.