"Yes," said Marjorie, "we will go back," and saw minutely and distantly, and yet as clearly and brightly as if she looked into a concave mirror, that tall and dignified study, a very high room indeed, with a man writing before a fine, long-curtained window and a great lump of rich-glowing Labradorite upon his desk before him holding together an accumulation of written sheets.... She knew exactly the shop in Oxford Street where the stuff for the curtains might be best obtained. § 17 One night Marjorie had been sitting musing before the stove for a long time, and suddenly she said: "I wonder if we shall fail. I wonder if we shall get into a mess again when we are back in London.... As big a mess and as utter a discontent as sent us here...." Trafford was scraping out his pipe, and did not answer for some moments. Then he remarked: "What nonsense!" "But we shall," she said. "Everybody fails. To some extent, we are bound to fail. Because indeed nothing is clear; nothing is a clear issue.... You know--I'm just the old Marjorie really in spite of all these resolutions--the spendthrift, the restless, the eager. I'm a born snatcher and shopper. We're just the same people really." "No," he said, after thought. "You're all Labrador older." "I always _have_ failed," she considered, "when it came to any special temptations, Rag. I can't _stand_ not having a thing!" He made no answer. "And you're still the same old Rag, you know," she went on. "Who weakens into kindness if I cry. Who likes me well-dressed. Who couldn't endure to see me poor." "Not a bit of it. No! I'm a very different Rag with a very different Marjorie. Yes indeed! Things--are graver. Why!--I'm lame for life--and I've a scar. The very _look_ of things is changed...." He stared at her face and said: "You've hidden the looking-glass and you think I haven't noted it----" "It keeps on healing," she interrupted. "And if it comes to that--where's my complexion?" She laughed. "These are just the superficial aspects of the case." "Nothing ever heals completely," he said, answering her first sentence, "and nothing ever goes back to the exact place it held before. We _are_ different, you sun-bitten, frost-bitten wife of mine."... "Character is character," said Marjorie, coming back to her point. "Don't exaggerate conversion, dear. It's not a bit of good pretending we shan't fall away, both of us. Each in our own manner. We shall. We shall, old man. London is still a tempting and confusing place, and you can't alter people fundamentally, not even by half-freezing and half-starving them. You only alter people fundamentally by killing them and replacing them. I shall be extravagant again and forget again, try as I may, and you will work again and fall away again and forgive me again. You know----It's just as though we were each of us not one person, but a lot of persons, who sometimes meet and shout all together, and then disperse and forget and plot against each other...."