“Weren’t there two of you when you came in?” she asked and Derek realized that Rupert had fled. “Fairy!” he called, and opened the door. “Come in, man.”
Mary laughed. “Fairy?” she said. “You’ve a quaint name. Fairy by name and nature. Fairies disappear.”
He was distressingly embarrassed. Carton had, merely instinctively, called him by the usual nickname, and was he, to escape her gay quizzing, to draw himself up grandly and to say that he wasn’t Fairy but Sir Rupert? “Fairy” set her first impressions against him, but to attempt their correction by announcing that he had a title might, by its pompousness, only turn bad to worse. Better, for the moment, let it slide. He smiled gallantly. “When I disappear again,” he said, “it will be because you tell me to.” He cursed his unreadiness to rise above the level of idiocy.
“Do you know, Miss Arden, Fairy comes from Lancashire,” said Derek, by way of magnanimously helping a lame dog over a stile.
“Does he?” said Mary listlessly. She could see in her glass without turning round his large supple frame and his handsome face which would, she thought, look better without the conventional mustache. She placed men quickly now. Well-bred, this boy, gentle. Too gentle? Probably not. Big men were apt to be gentle through very consciousness of strength, and he was graceful for all his size. “Fairy” would do: decidedly he would do to replace as her decorative companion across restaurant tables her latest cavalier who had just gone back to France.
“Oh,” he was saying, “it won’t interest Miss Arden that I come from Lancashire.”
“Well,” she said, hinting a gulf impassable between North and South, “I’m a London actress.”
“That’s the miracle of it,” he said. “Lancashire’s an old slag-heap of a county and one couldn’t be proud of it. Only, by Jove, I am, since hearing you. It’s queer, but when you spoke Lancashire it was as if I met an old friend I hadn’t seen for a long time. I know it’s awful cheek, Miss Arden, but it seemed to put me on an equality with you.”
She did not know he was a Hepplestall, she missed the poignant irony of their identities, but when Sir Rupert haltingly told her that it was “awful cheek” in him to feel on an equality with the exalted Mary Ellen Bradshaw, she had, unusually, the thought that she ought to check this absurd diffidence by blurting out that she learned her Lancashire on Staithley Streets, that she was not acting but was the real, raw thing. It was not often, these days, that Mary blushed to accept homage. She hadn’t put herself, the times, the strange perverted times, had put her on a pinnacle and, being there, she did what men seemed gratified that she should do, she looked down on them. But because she kept her head, she had not resented, she had welcomed, the one or two occasions when she had been made to feel ashamed. There was a man, now dead, whom she recalled because Rupert was making her in the same way look at herself through a diminishing-glass. He had, unlike the most, talked to her of the things they were doing over there: he had told her in a matter-of-fact way of their daily life and she had made comparisons with hers, she had dwindled to her true dimensions. And Rupert by means she couldn’t analyze was giving a similar, salutary experience. She felt shrunken before him and was happy to shrink.
Derek’s formula for the correct welcome of a fighting soldier on leave included supper at a night club, and they were wasting time on the impossible woman. “I expect you want to turn us out so that you can dress,” he cut in.