What they did not understand, what William himself did not foresee, was that his difficulties were to be increased by the conduct of his wife. Mrs. William had failed to realize that in marrying William she married a Service. She thought she married the head of Hepplestall’s Manchester offices and that she had, as a result, her position in Manchester and her distinguished home in Alderley Edge, which is almost a rural suburb and, also, the seat of a peer. Short of living in London, to which she had vague aspirations when William retired, she was very well content with her degree; and the news that she was expected to uproot herself and to live in Staithley came as a startling assault on settled prepossessions. While she hadn’t the challenging habit of asserting that she was of Manchester and proud of it, she knew the difference between Manchester, where one could pretend one was not provincial, and Staithley, where no such pretense was possible, and it was vainly that William told her of Lady Hepplestall’s offer to leave the Hall in their favor. Sir Philip’s widow knew, if Mrs. William didn’t, what was incumbent on a Hepplestall. “In other words, we’re to be caretakers for Rupert,” she said. “What will become of my Red Cross committee work here?” William suggested that by using the car she need be cut off from none of her activities. “But I’m to live down there,” she said, “decentralized, in darkest Lancashire,” and she had her alternative. If the firm required this irrational sacrifice of William’s wife, he had surely his reply that he was rich enough to retire and would retire with her, to London. Her friend, Lady Duxbury, was already preparing to move to London after the war; the William Hepplestalls could move now. They were forced to move now. “It is not a question of being rich enough to retire,” he said. “No doubt I am that; but I am an able-bodied servant of the firm. We Hepplestalls do not retire while we are capable of service.” She had never thought him so dull a dog before; she whistled at the obligations of the Service, and she exaggerated the influence of a wife which persuades in proportion as it is ventured sparingly, seasonably, and with due regard to the example of pig-drivers who, when they would have their charges go to the left, make a feint of driving them to the right. “Sir Ralph Duxbury is younger than you,” she argued, “and he’s retiring at the end of the war. They’re going to London to enjoy life before they’re too old.” “Duxbury,” said William severely, “is a war-profiteer. His future plans tally with his present.” “Oh, how can you say that of your friend?” “I can say it of most of my friends. But you would hardly suggest that it is true of me. You would hardly put the case of a Hepplestall on all fours with the case of a Duxbury.” She did suggest it. “But surely you are all in business to make money!”