But it may be hazarded that first steps, even in paradise, are not sure-footed, and in spite of his bodily ease, and the “atmosphere” of Mr. Rossiter’s stalls and his eagerness to be amused, his mind, accustomed to the grotesque convention, war, did not immediately accept the grotesque convention, musical comedy. In a day or two he would, no doubt, be as greedy of unreality as any believer in the fantastic untruths distributed to the Press by the War Office propaganda departments, but he was too lately come to Cloud Cuckoo Land to have sloughed his sanity yet. He had yearned for color and he had it now; and the vivid glare of a Rossiter musical comedy put an intolerable strain upon his eyes, while the humor of the comedians put his brain in chancery. Home-grown jokes, he supposed, and yet their mess had fancied itself at wit. He was regretful that he had not insisted on Robey. Robey was the skilled liaison officer between Front and Leave. Robey jerked one’s thoughts irresistibly into the right groove at once; he wouldn’t have sat under Robey wilting to the dismal conviction that his first evening on leave was turning to failure. Then, from off-stage, a girl began to speak, and Rupert sat taut in his stall. He all but rose and stood to attention as Mary Arden appeared in the character of that inapposite Lancastrian in Granada. She did not merely salt the meat for him; there was no meat but her. He thought that, then blushed at the coarseness of a metaphor which compared this girl with meat. She spoke in the dialect of Lancashire and where he had been dull to the humor of the comedians, all was crystal now. Boredom left him; the morose sentiment of a ruined evening melted like cloud in the sunshine of Mary Arden; phoenixlike leave rose again to the level of anticipation and beyond.