Chown had a talk, rather than “that” talk, with Mary, omitting, for instance, Rossiter’s recommendation of matrimony as essential to an actress. Experience, with or without marriage lines, might tap an emotional reservoir but, in her case, the experience would certainly go with marriage and Chown had suffered too often by the retirement of his successful clients after marriage to risk advising it. He considered Rossiter incautious. “There’s a part for you in ‘Granada the Gay,’” he told her, “that is going to make you a new reputation. A Lancashire part and London will think you’re acting it. You and I know you _are_ it, but we won’t mention that.” “This is interesting,” said Mary Ellen with shining eyes. “I’ll work at this. I’ll show them something.” Chown nodded, satisfied that she would, in fact, “show them” enough to silence Rossiter’s murmurings for the next two years--nobody looked for a shorter run than that from a musical comedy in war time--and Rossiter was indeed ungrudging in his admission that Mary’s demure Lancastrian, with the terrific and accurate accent coming with such rugged veracity from those pretty lips, was the success of “Granada the Gay.” People were going with scant selectiveness to all theaters alike, but there were a few, and the Galaxy among them, which had their special lure. It was a curiosity of the time, full though the theaters were, that advance bookings were low. No one could see ahead, no one’s time was his own and perhaps that was the reason or perhaps it was only the sentiment which underlay the practice of going impulsively to theaters without the solemnity of premeditation involved in booking seats many days ahead; and the two young officers, sitting down to dinner, were not remarkable in expecting at that late hour to get stalls at any theater they pleased. “Libraries”--that curious misnomer of the ticket agencies--perhaps kept up their sleeves a parcel of certainly saleable tickets for the benefit of abrupt men in khaki, but libraries were crowded places to be avoided by those who had the officering habit of telling some one else to do the tedious little things. “We might go on to a show after this,” said Derek Carton. “Don’t you think so, Fairy? Waiter, send a page with the theater list. I want tickets for something.”