“I’m going there this afternoon, as a matter of fact, probably for the last time. I don’t think the word is ‘ashamed,’ though. I’ve outgrown Lancashire. I shall settle in London after the war. Look here, may I tell you about it? Theoretically, I was supposed to go back to Lancashire some day, after I’d finished at Cambridge. To go back on terms I loathed, and I didn’t mean to go back. I was reading pretty hard at Cambridge, not for fun, but to get a degree--a decent degree; to have something to wave in their faces as a fairly solid reason for not going back. I thought of going to the bar, just by way of being something reasonable, but I don’t know that it matters now. I mean after the war they can’t possibly expect the things of a man that they thought it was possible, and I didn’t, to expect before. My father’s dead, too, since then. And that makes a lot of difference. I’m awfully sorry he died, but I can’t help seeing that his death liberates me. I shan’t go back to Lancashire at any price.” He had the earnest fluency of a man talking about himself to a woman. How well she knew it! And how old, how wise, how much more experienced than the oldest war-scarred veteran of them all did she not feel when her young men poured out their simple histories to her! But she was used to the form of consultation. They put it to her, as a rule, that they sought her advice and though she knew quite well that their object was to flatter, it piqued her now that Rupert did not ask advice. He reasoned, perhaps, and his assertion was not of what he would do after the war but of what he positively would not. He was not going back to Lancashire and, “You do pay compliments,” she said a little tartly. “You bring out to lunch an actress who’s doing a Lancashire part and you tell her that Lancashire’s not good enough for you.” “But that’s your art,” he cried, “to be so wonderfully not yourself. Seriously, Miss Arden, for you, a London actress, to be absolutely a Lancashire girl on the stage is sheer miracle. But that’s not the question and between us two, is Lancashire a place fit to live in?” So he bracketed them together, people of the great world. “I won’t commit myself,” she said. It was not her art, it was herself, but she couldn’t answer back his candor with candor of her own and felt again at disadvantage with him. He attacked and she could not defend. She said, “Oh, I expect you’ll get what you want. You look the sort that does.” She was almost vicious about it. “I hope I shall,” he said, gazing ingenuous admiration at her. “For instance--” She moved sharply as if she dodged a blow. Men did queer things on leave; she had had proposals from them though she knew them as little as she knew Rupert. “For instance,” he went on imperviously, “shall I get this? Shall I get your promise to have lunch with me here on Thursday? I shall be back from Lancashire by then.”