"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. § 6