Lady Montdore sat well back on the sofa, both her feet on the ground. She seemed planted there, immovable and solid, not actually fat, but solid through and through. Smartness, even if she had sought after it, would hardly be attainable by her in a world where it was personified by the other, and had become almost as much a question of build, of quick and nervous movements, as of actual clothes. Her hair was shingled, but it was grey and fluffy, by no means a smooth cap; her eyebrows grew at will, and when she remembered to use lipstick and powder they were any colour and slapped on anyhow, so that her face, compared with that of Mrs Chaddesley Corbett, was as a hayfield is to a lawn, her whole head looking twice as large as the polished little head beside her. All the same she was not disagreeable to look at. There was a healthiness and liveliness about her face which lent it a certain attraction. Of course, she seemed to me, then, very old. She was, in fact, about fifty-eight.