“And this photograph?”
He shook his head. “It might be any hill.”
“But it is Staithley Edge.”
For a moment he was radiant. “You got it,” he glowed, “because of me.”
“I got it because of me. Listen. I’m Mary Arden, actress. I’m twenty-five years old and I’m about as high as any one can get in musical comedy. I began in the chorus, but I’ve had a soft passage up because I was pushed by an agent who believed in me. If you think I’m more than that, you’re wrong. And I’m much less than that. I said I had no people, and it isn’t true.”
“I don’t want to know about your people. We’re you and I. We’re Mary and Rupert.”
“Yes. But we’re Mary Bradshaw and Rupert Hepplestall.”
With that, she thought, she slaughtered hope, not his alone but something that grew in her, something she was thinking of as hope because she dared not think of it as love. Now she need no longer think of it at all; she had killed it; she had met his candor with her candor, she had announced herself a Bradshaw. It was the death of hope.
Suffering herself but compassionate for the pain she must have given him, she raised her eyes to his. And the response to a lady martyring herself to truth was an indulgent smile and maddening misapprehension. “Is there anything in that? Bradshaw instead of Arden? Surely it’s usual to have a stage-name.”
“You haven’t understood. When I pretend to be Lancashire on the stage, I don’t pretend. Is that clear?”