His companion, only arrived that day from France, let his eyes stray sensuously over the appointments of the restaurant. He was to eat in a room decorated in emulation of a palace at Versailles; the chefs were French; the guests, when they were not American, were of every allied or neutral European nationality; the band played jazz music; and to the marrow of him, as he contemplated the ornate evidences of materialistic civilization, he exulted in his England. The hardship was that he couldn’t spend the whole of this leave in London: he must go, to-morrow, to Staithley. He was, he had been for six months, Sir Rupert Hepplestall, but when his father died the 1918 German push was on and leave impossible. Decidedly he must go North, this time, this once, though--oh, hang the Hepplestalls! Why couldn’t they let him go quietly, to look in decent privacy at his father’s grave? But no: they must make him a director of the firm and they must call a meeting for him to attend. Well-meaning but absurd old men who had not or who would not see that Rupert was free of Hepplestall’s now. Sincerely he mourned his father’s death, and they wouldn’t let him be simple about it, they complicated a fellow’s pilgrimage to Sir Philip’s grave by their obtuse attempt to thrust his feet into Sir Philip’s shoes. That needn’t matter to-night, though, that sour affront to the idea of leave: it was his complication not Carton’s who, good man, had met him at the station. Like Rupert, Carton had gone from Cambridge to the war, then he had lost a leg and now had a job at the War Office: and the jolly thing was that Carton hadn’t altered, he was as he used to be even to calling Rupert by that old nickname. If you have seventy-three inches you are naturally called Fairy and out there nobody ever thought of calling you anything else except on frigidly official occasions. But you were never quite sure of the home point of view; the thing called war-mind made such amazing rabid asses of the people who were not fighting and you weren’t certain even of Carton and now you were a little ashamed of having been uncertain. Of course, old Carton would not rot him about his title; of course, he would call him Fairy, he wouldn’t allude to that baronetcy of which Rupert was still so shy. “Stop dreaming, Fairy,” said Derek, and he looked across the table to find a page-boy at Derek’s elbow and a theater-list on the table before him. “What shall it be?” “Oh, Robey, I suppose.” “Yes,” Derek agreed. “Usually Robey’s first choice. Just now, it’s Robey or ‘Granada the Gay,’ with a girl called Arden.” “You’re in charge,” said Rupert. “I’ve heard of Mary Arden.”