What prevented him from telling her when she came into the restaurant and held out her hand with an “Ah, Captain Fairy,” was her disconcerting frock. It was not an unusual frock except that it was a fashionable and supreme frock and Mary had torn off two other fashionable frocks before she decided that this was an occasion for a supreme frock. It was an occasion, she admitted by stages marked by the change of frock, for her best defenses. She had welcomed medicinally the purge to pride he had unconsciously administered but he must not make a habit of it and from head to foot, within and without, she wrapped herself in dress-assurance. “You’re stunning,” he said at sight of her, stupidly and truthfully, missing the finer excellences of her frock, disconcerted by it simply because it was a frock. Idiot, he called himself, did he expect her to come to the Carlton in a white silk dressing-gown with her hair down her shoulders? But neither on the stage nor in her dressing-room had he seen her with her hair up and he hadn’t, in that particular, been imaginative about her. He saw her now a well-dressed woman, superbly a woman, but so different from the Mary of stage-costume or of dishabille, so wonderfully more mysterious, that his illusion of knowing her very soul dropped from him and left him bankrupt of confidence in the presence of a lady charming but unknown. They were at a table and Mary had the conversation under control long before he realized that she was still addressing him as Captain Fairy. Perhaps, after all, his assertion of himself would go best with the coffee: he resolved very firmly that he wouldn’t let it slide beyond the coffee. He became aware of subtle oppositions between them, of pleasant undercurrents in action and reaction making an electricity of their own; he sensed her evident desire to lead the conversation. Well, she would naturally play first fiddle to a Fairy, but perhaps there was something else and, if so, he could put that right without embarrassing himself. She had said last night, as if pointedly, “I’m a London actress,” thinking of him, no doubt, as a provincial. He said, “By the way, Carton mentioned last night that I come from Lancashire. His point was, I suppose, that it would interest you because you happen to be playing a Lancashire part. I’m Lancashire by the accident of birth, but I hope I’ve outlived it in my life.” “Oh!” said Mary, thinking of a photograph of Staithley Edge which hung on the wall of her flat almost with the significance of the ikon in a Russian peasant’s room, “oh, are you ashamed of Lancashire?”