"But I thought we were going on tramp," she objected. "Dinner first, tramping afterward," he said, "a long while afterward. I don't propose to let you tramp in those worldly shoes." They were new and brown and soft to look at--as soft as other people's gloves, he thought. "Don't dress for dinner," he said as they drew up in front of the Midlothian Hotel. "And, I say, I expect it would be safer to dine here; it's absolutely the last place where any of your people would look for you." The dress in which she rejoined him later was a walking-dress of dark blue melting to a half transparency at neck and sleeves. "I bought it at that shop," she said. "It isn't bad, is it? They said it was a Paris model--and, anyhow, it fits." He wanted to tell her that she looked adorable in it, and that she would look adorable not only in a Paris model, but in a Whitechapel one. But he didn't tell her this. Nor did he tell her much else. The dinner owed to her any brightness that it showed when shelved as a memory. She exerted herself to talk. And it was the talk of a lady to her dinner partner--light, gay, and sparkling, anything but intimate--hardly friendly, even; polite, pleasant, indifferent. He did not like it; he did not like, either, his own inability to carry on the duet in the key she had set, and at the same time he knew that he could not change the key. The surge of the world was round them again, even though it was only the world of the provincial haberdasher and the haberdasher's provincial wife. The smooth, swift passage of laden waiters across the thick carpets of the dining-room; the little tables gay with pink sweet-peas and rosy-hued lamps; the women in smart blouses, most of them sparkling beadily; the rare evening toilettes, worn in every case with an air of conscious importance, as of one to whom wearing evening dress was a rare and serious exception to the rule of life; the buzz of conversation curiously softer and lower in pitch than the talk at the Ritz and the Carlton--all made an atmosphere of opposition, an atmosphere in which all that appeared socially impossible--which, under the stars last night, had seemed natural, inevitable--the only thing to do. This world to which he had brought her had, at least, this in common with the world which dines at the Carlton and the Ritz, that it bristled with the negation of what last night had seemed the simplest solution in the world. But it had only seemed simple, as he now saw, because the solution had been arrived at out of the world. Here, beyond any doubt, was the antagonism to all that he and she had planned. This was the world where the worst scandal is the unusual--where it would be less socially blighting to steal another man's wife than to set off on a tramp with a princess to whom you were tied neither by marriage nor by kinship.