From the first moment Dorothy felt more herself in the Vanity than she had felt all those six months of touring. She was, of course, stared at and criticized, but she was never acutely conscious of the jealousy that had glared from the eyes of her companions in the provinces. The beauty of her rivals in this metropolitan chorus only made her own beauty more remarkable; she, being the first to recognize this, accorded to her associates such a frank and such an obviously sincere admiration that she gained a reputation for simplicity, which the other girls ascribed to innocence. From innocence to mystery is but a short step in an ambient like the Vanity, and without a Lily or a Sylvia to tell the other girls too much about her, Dorothy developed the mysterious aspect of herself and left her innocence undefined. At the Vanity there was none of the destructive intimacy of touring life. Nobody ever saw the ladies of this chorus in polychrome on the wet platform of a Yorkshire railway station; nobody ever saw the ladies of this chorus tilting with a hatpin at pickled onions; nobody, in fact, had any excuse for being disillusioned by the ladies of the Vanity, because, being individually and collectively aware of their national importance, they were never really off the stage; indeed, except occasionally in their bedrooms, perhaps, they were never really behind the scenes. The fancy of a casual observer, who lingered for a moment at the stage-door to watch the ladies of the Vanity tripping out of their hansoms, was as much stimulated by the sight as the fancy of the regular patron who from the front of the house was privileged to observe them tripping on to the stage. They were brilliant butterflies by day and gorgeous moths by night; though nature forbids us to suppose that they never were caterpillars, their larval state is as unimaginable as the touch of time that worked the metamorphosis.