Dorothy, by spending in complete seclusion the two months before rehearsals began, prepared herself to shimmer as clearly as she could in the shimmering galaxy that was to make "The River Girl" as big a hit as "Miss Elsie of Chelsea." She declined to accompany her family to the seaside in August, being sure that August at Eastbourne would be bad for her complexion; therefore she remained behind in Lonsdale Road with the cook, who by the time Dorothy had finished with her began to have ambitions to be a lady's maid. Nothing is more richly transfigured by unfamiliarity than the empty streets of a London suburb in mid-August, when their sun-dyed silence quivers upon the air like noon in Italy. At such a season the sorceress Calypso might not have disdained West Kensington for her spells; Dorothy, dream-haunted and with nothing more strenuous than singing-lessons and fashion papers to impinge upon the drowsy days, lived on self-enchantment. She never sent Lord Clarehaven the promised photograph, not did she even write him a letter; after deliberation she had decided that it would be more effective to appear upon his next horizon like a new planet rather than to wane slowly from his recollection like a summer moon. To write from an address at which it would be impossible to renew their acquaintance would be foolish. Besides, with such a future as hers at the Vanity was surely bound to be, did one Clarehaven more or less matter? He had served his purpose in demonstrating the ease with which she could reach beyond other girls; but, as Mary, the cook, had observed last night in recounting her rupture with the milkman, "plenty more mothers had sons," and if Clarehaven arrived impatiently at the same conclusion about the supply of daughters, that was better than exposing herself to the greater humiliation of being taken up in an idle moment and as readily dropped again. Dorothy's imagination had been touched by reading of three Vanity marriages that were now sharing the attention of the holiday press with giant gooseberries and vegetable marrows of mortal seeming. The younger son of a duke, the eldest son of a viscount, a Welsh baronet had, one after another, made those gaps in the Vanity chorus, to fill one of which Dorothy had been chosen by the provident Mr. Richards; she accepted the omen, and made up her mind that for her it should always be marriage or nothing.