He heard his wife's clear voice in the hall below, and went down to meet her. She had gone into the drawing-room, and he followed her in and through the folding doors to the hinder part of the room, where she stood ready to open a small bureau. She turned at his approach, and smiled a pleasant, habitual smile.... She was no longer the slim, quick-moving girl who had come out of the world to him when he crawled from beneath the wreckage of Solomonson's plane, no longer the half-barbaric young beauty who had been revealed to him on the staircase of the Vevey villa. She was now a dignified, self-possessed woman, controlling her house and her life with a skilful, subtle appreciation of her every point and possibility. She was wearing now a simple walking dress of brownish fawn colour, and her hat was touched with a steely blue that made her blue eyes seem handsome and hard, and toned her hair to a merely warm brown. She had, as it were, subdued her fine colours into a sheath in order that she might presently draw them again with more effect. "Hullo, old man!" she said, "you home?" He nodded. "The club bored me--and I couldn't work." 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.