What prevented him from telling her when she came into the restaurant and held out her hand with an “Ah, Captain Fairy,” was her disconcerting frock. It was not an unusual frock except that it was a fashionable and supreme frock and Mary had torn off two other fashionable frocks before she decided that this was an occasion for a supreme frock. It was an occasion, she admitted by stages marked by the change of frock, for her best defenses. She had welcomed medicinally the purge to pride he had unconsciously administered but he must not make a habit of it and from head to foot, within and without, she wrapped herself in dress-assurance.
“You’re stunning,” he said at sight of her, stupidly and truthfully, missing the finer excellences of her frock, disconcerted by it simply because it was a frock. Idiot, he called himself, did he expect her to come to the Carlton in a white silk dressing-gown with her hair down her shoulders? But neither on the stage nor in her dressing-room had he seen her with her hair up and he hadn’t, in that particular, been imaginative about her. He saw her now a well-dressed woman, superbly a woman, but so different from the Mary of stage-costume or of dishabille, so wonderfully more mysterious, that his illusion of knowing her very soul dropped from him and left him bankrupt of confidence in the presence of a lady charming but unknown.
They were at a table and Mary had the conversation under control long before he realized that she was still addressing him as Captain Fairy. Perhaps, after all, his assertion of himself would go best with the coffee: he resolved very firmly that he wouldn’t let it slide beyond the coffee. He became aware of subtle oppositions between them, of pleasant undercurrents in action and reaction making an electricity of their own; he sensed her evident desire to lead the conversation. Well, she would naturally play first fiddle to a Fairy, but perhaps there was something else and, if so, he could put that right without embarrassing himself. She had said last night, as if pointedly, “I’m a London actress,” thinking of him, no doubt, as a provincial.
He said, “By the way, Carton mentioned last night that I come from Lancashire. His point was, I suppose, that it would interest you because you happen to be playing a Lancashire part. I’m Lancashire by the accident of birth, but I hope I’ve outlived it in my life.”
“Oh!” said Mary, thinking of a photograph of Staithley Edge which hung on the wall of her flat almost with the significance of the ikon in a Russian peasant’s room, “oh, are you ashamed of Lancashire?”
“I’m going there this afternoon, as a matter of fact, probably for the last time. I don’t think the word is ‘ashamed,’ though. I’ve outgrown Lancashire. I shall settle in London after the war. Look here, may I tell you about it? Theoretically, I was supposed to go back to Lancashire some day, after I’d finished at Cambridge. To go back on terms I loathed, and I didn’t mean to go back. I was reading pretty hard at Cambridge, not for fun, but to get a degree—a decent degree; to have something to wave in their faces as a fairly solid reason for not going back. I thought of going to the bar, just by way of being something reasonable, but I don’t know that it matters now. I mean after the war they can’t possibly expect the things of a man that they thought it was possible, and I didn’t, to expect before. My father’s dead, too, since then. And that makes a lot of difference. I’m awfully sorry he died, but I can’t help seeing that his death liberates me. I shan’t go back to Lancashire at any price.”
He had the earnest fluency of a man talking about himself to a woman. How well she knew it! And how old, how wise, how much more experienced than the oldest war-scarred veteran of them all did she not feel when her young men poured out their simple histories to her! But she was used to the form of consultation. They put it to her, as a rule, that they sought her advice and though she knew quite well that their object was to flatter, it piqued her now that Rupert did not ask advice. He reasoned, perhaps, and his assertion was not of what he would do after the war but of what he positively would not. He was not going back to Lancashire and, “You do pay compliments,” she said a little tartly. “You bring out to lunch an actress who’s doing a Lancashire part and you tell her that Lancashire’s not good enough for you.”
“But that’s your art,” he cried, “to be so wonderfully not yourself. Seriously, Miss Arden, for you, a London actress, to be absolutely a Lancashire girl on the stage is sheer miracle. But that’s not the question and between us two, is Lancashire a place fit to live in?” So he bracketed them together, people of the great world.
“I won’t commit myself,” she said. It was not her art, it was herself, but she couldn’t answer back his candor with candor of her own and felt again at disadvantage with him. He attacked and she could not defend. She said, “Oh, I expect you’ll get what you want. You look the sort that does.” She was almost vicious about it.
“I hope I shall,” he said, gazing ingenuous admiration at her. “For instance—”