Rupert escaped, miserable because he was not elated to leave that torture-chamber. He hadn’t faced the music. But he couldn’t. Altogether apart from his wish to get out of Staithley at the first possible moment, he couldn’t face that music. Their expectations of him were so massive, so serene, so sure, their line unbreakable. In the train, he recurred to that thought of the Hepplestall line. No: he could not break it, but there might be a way round. He was going to London, where Mary was, and the point, surely the point about the training of a Hepplestall was that they caught their Hepplestalls young. They cozened them with the idea of service and sent them, willing victims, to labor with their hands in Staithley Mills--because they caught them young. Rupert was twenty-five. Cynically he “placed” that meeting now: it was a super-cozening addressed to a Hepplestall who was no longer a boy: it admitted his age and the intolerable indignities the training held for a man of his age, for a captain who had a real chance of becoming a major very soon. It was their effort, their demonstration, and he saw his way to make an effort and a counter demonstration. Clearly, they saw that it wasn’t reasonable to train a man of his years to spinning and the rest of it; then they would see the absolute impossibility of compelling a married man to undergo that training. A man couldn’t leave his wife at some Godless early morning hour to go to work with his hands, he couldn’t come home, work-stained, after a day’s consorting with the operatives, to the lady who was Lady Hepplestall. He realized, awed by his presumptuousness, that he was thinking of Mary Arden as the lady who was Lady Hep-plestall. He thought of her with awe because he was not seeing Mary Arden, musical comedy actress, through the elderly eyes of his uncles, still less of his aunts, but from the angle of our soldiers in France who made Mary a romantic symbol of the girls they left behind them. To marry Mary Arden would be an awfully big adventure. ***** She had time, while he was at Staithley, to come to terms with his disclosure. In the restaurant, when it came upon her suddenly, it had sent her, certainly, heels over head, but, soberly considered, she began to ask herself what there was in it that should disconcert her. She was Bradshaw and he a Hepplestall and she believed that without effort, merely by not discouraging him, she could make him marry her. What could be neater? What revenge more exquisite upon the Hepplestalls than Mary Ellen Bradshaw, Lady Hepplestall? True--if she hated them. But her hatred, reexamined, seemed a visionary thing; at the most it was romantic decoration to a fact and in this mood of inquisition Mary sought facts without their trimmings. She sought her hatred of the Hepplestalls and found she had no hatred in her.