He had to mar with Lancashire this leave which had suddenly turned so glamorous; there was the more reason, then, for boldness, for grasping firmly the opportunity presented by Carton’s introduction, but it troubled him to shyness to think that he had so greatly the advantage of her. He had watched her for three hours and she hadn’t seen him yet. It seemed to him unfair. His first impression, as her dressing-room door opened to Derek and he looked over his friend’s shoulder, was of cool white walls and chintz hangings. The gilt Empire chairs, relics of a forgotten Rossiter production, which furnished the cell-like room as if it were a great lady’s prison de luxe in bygone France, added in some indefinable way to its femininity. The hangings bulged disconcertingly over clothing. In his stall he had established that he knew her, but this seemed too abrupt a plunge into her intimacy. She sat, with her back to him, at a table littered with mysteries, and her hair hung loosely down her white silk dressing-gown. He turned away, with burning face, only to find in that room of mirrors no place to which to turn. Carton, that lump of ice, was unaffected, and so was Mary herself who continued, messily, to remove grease-paint from her face with vaseline and a vigorous towel while she gave Carton, sideways, an oily hand. She was not incommoding herself for a man she hardly remembered. “Weren’t there two of you when you came in?” she asked and Derek realized that Rupert had fled. “Fairy!” he called, and opened the door. “Come in, man.” Mary laughed. “Fairy?” she said. “You’ve a quaint name. Fairy by name and nature. Fairies disappear.” He was distressingly embarrassed. Carton had, merely instinctively, called him by the usual nickname, and was he, to escape her gay quizzing, to draw himself up grandly and to say that he wasn’t Fairy but Sir Rupert? “Fairy” set her first impressions against him, but to attempt their correction by announcing that he had a title might, by its pompousness, only turn bad to worse. Better, for the moment, let it slide. He smiled gallantly. “When I disappear again,” he said, “it will be because you tell me to.” He cursed his unreadiness to rise above the level of idiocy. “Do you know, Miss Arden, Fairy comes from Lancashire,” said Derek, by way of magnanimously helping a lame dog over a stile. “Does he?” said Mary listlessly. She could see in her glass without turning round his large supple frame and his handsome face which would, she thought, look better without the conventional mustache. She placed men quickly now. Well-bred, this boy, gentle. Too gentle? Probably not. Big men were apt to be gentle through very consciousness of strength, and he was graceful for all his size. “Fairy” would do: decidedly he would do to replace as her decorative companion across restaurant tables her latest cavalier who had just gone back to France. “Oh,” he was saying, “it won’t interest Miss Arden that I come from Lancashire.”