“Yes, I’ll lunch,” she said convulsively, calling herself a fool to have misjudged him and a soppy fool, like the soppiest fool of a girl at the theater, to be so apt to think of marriage. Yet Mary thought much of marriage, not as the “soppy fools” thought, hopefully, but defensively. Marriage did not march with her dream in stone and the thought of Mary Ellen Bradshaw on Staithley Edge. She fought always for that idea, and refusals were the trophies she had won in her campaigns for it, usually easy victories, but once or twice she had not found it easy to refuse. Did Rupert jeopardize the dream? She couldn’t say and, thank God, she needn’t say. He hadn’t asked her, but she admitted apprehension, she confessed that he belonged with those very few who had made her dream appear a bleak and empty thing. This man disturbed her: she was right to be on her guard, to bristle in defense of her dream at the least sign of passion in him. But she despised herself for bristling unnecessarily, for imagining a sign which wasn’t there. He had, confoundedly, the habit of making her despise herself. Then it happened, not what she had feared would happen but something even more disturbing. “Ah,” he said gayly, “then that’s a bet. That’s something to look forward to while I’m at Staithley.” Staithley! Staithley! It rang in her brain. Stammering she spoke it. “Staithley!” “Yes,” he said. “It’s a Lancashire town. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of it, but my people, well, we’re rather big pots up there.” “In Staithley?” she repeated. “Yes. We’re called Hepplestall.” He looked at her guiltily. Mary’s teeth were clenched and her bloodless hands gripped the table hard, but actress twice over, woman and Mary Arden, and modern with cosmetics, her face showed nothing of her inward storm. “That idiotic name Carton called me by--they all do it,” he protested loyally. “It’s odds on that they’ve forgotten what my real name is but I’m Rupert Hepplestall really and... oh, as a matter of form, I’m Sir Rupert Hepplestall. I--I can’t help it, you know.” One didn’t make a scene in a restaurant. One didn’t scream in a restaurant. One didn’t go into hysterics in a restaurant. That was all she consciously thought, clutching the table till it seemed the veins in her fingers must burst. Hepplestall--and she. And Mary Ellen Bradshaw. Lunching together. Oh, it--but she was thinking and she must not think. She must repeat, over and over again, “One does not make a scene, one--” Immensely surprised she heard herself say, “No, you can’t help it,” and as she saw him smile--the smile of a schoolboy who is “let off” a peccadillo--she concluded that she must have smiled at him.