IF some one idiosyncratic and original, some one bold to challenge the accepted order, had dared to put Mary Arden on her defense, if it had been asked what she was doing in the war, she would have replied with cool assurance that she was keeping her head about it when nothing was more easy than intemperance. Every day her post brought letters which encouraged the belief, not that she made an opportunity of war, but that she held high rank amongst home-keeping indispensables. Her letters from unknown men in the trenches were explicit that Mary Arden was the England they were fighting for—food, if she had cared to eat it, for the grossest conceit.

She was, by now, the leading musical comedy exponent of demureness, with Chown as her undroppable pilot; and Pate, Darley and a procession of stage managers who had steered less ably than that devoted pair were forgotten’ rungs on the ladder she had climbed. She kept her head about things more yeasty, in her microcosm more demoralizing, than the war; she kept her head about success and kept it about men. She rode vanity on the snaffle because she was herself ridden by ambition.

Once the ambition had been trivial, once she had aimed no higher than a house in Staithley as big as Walter Pate’s, but she had grown since then and, with her, ambition grew, rooted in something older than her vanity or than herself, rooted in the Bradshaw hatred of the Hepplestalls. Secretly she nursed her ambition to possess a great house on Staithley Edge, high, dominating the town of the Hepplestalls, a house to make the old Hall look like a cottage, a house where she would live, resuming her name of Bradshaw, eclipsing the Hepplestalls in Staithley.

In eyes accustomed to the London she had conquered, the Hepplestalls dwindled while Mary Arden, star, looked very big. There was veritable conspiracy to augment her sense of self-importance and even the newspapers, as the war degenerated into routine, gave of their restricted space to say, repeatedly, that Mary Arden was a “person.” To such an one, her ambition seemed no foolishness, but it wasn’t to be done just yet—nor by practicing such crude economies as those of her first cheese-paring tour. Dress mattered to her now; it belonged with her position like other sumptuosities inseparable from a position which was itself a symbol of extravagance. She rode the whirlwind of the war, a goddess of the Leave Front, dressing daintily as men would have her dress, but if there was lavishness at all it was for professional purposes only. It was lavishness corrected by prudence, lavishness calculated to maintain a position which was to lead her to a house in Staithley Edge. She was a careful spendthrift, and she was careful, too, in other ways. The dancing and the dining, the being seen with the right man at the right places—these were not so much the by-products of success as its buttresses; and to be expert in musical comedy acting implies expertness in the technique of being a gay companion. She exercised fastidious selectiveness, but, having chosen, gave her company at costly meals to young officers who returned to France swaggering in soul, mentioning aloud with infinite casualness that they had lunched with Mary Arden. It was tremendously the thing to do: one might be a lieutenant in France but one had carried a baton in London: and one didn’t, even when the sense of triumph led one to the mood of after-dinner boasting, hint that there was anything but her company at meals or at a dance to be had from Mary Arden. The Hepplestalls were going to find no chink in her immaculate armor when she queened it over them from her great house on the hill, but to suggest that mere pride was the motive of her continence is to do her an injustice.

Socially as well as theatrically, then, she had her vogue and nothing seemed to threaten it; yet Mr. Rossiter had the strange caprice to be not wholly satisfied with Mary Arden. As a captain of the light entertainment industry, he was doing exceedingly well out of the war; he had a high opinion of the Colonial soldiery; the young British officer was hardly behind the Colonial private in his eagerness to occupy Mr. Rossiter’s stalls, and at times when leave was suspended the civilian population filled the breach in its very natural desire for an antidote to anxiety. Surely he was captious to be finding fault anywhere, last of all with Mary Arden? But Hubert Rossiter did not hold his position by taking short views or by seeing only the obvious, and he sent for Mr. Chown to discuss with him the shortcomings of his client, Miss Arden.

“Sit down, Lexley,” he said. “Have you read that script I sent you?”

Mr. Chown produced from a neat attachÉ-case the typescript of Mr. Rossiter’s next play, with a nod which managed to convey, besides mere affirmation, his deep admiration of the inspired managerial judgment.

“Well, now,” said Rossiter briskly, “about Mary Arden. There’s, every musical reason why I should cast her for Teresa in this piece. She can sing the music. Leslie’s the alternative and Leslie can’t sing it. The question is, can Mary act it?”

Mr. Chown’s geese were not swans: he knew that his clients, even if they were his clients, had limitations. “I saw her in the other part as I read it, Hubert,” he fenced.

“The flapper part isn’t worth Mary’s salary. Now, is it? Seriously, I’m troubled about Mary.”

“What’s the matter with her?”

“She keeps her heart at her banker’s for one thing. Do you know she once came into this office with a ’bus ticket stuck in the cuff of her sleeve? A leading part at the Galaxy Theatre, and rides in a ’bus!”

“That wasn’t recently. Be fair, Hubert. And where do you want her to keep her heart?”

“Where she wore the ’bus ticket. On her sleeve. If she’s so fond of money, Lexley, why doesn’t she go after it? There’s plenty about.”

Chown stiffened in his chair. “As Miss Arden’s agent, Hubert,” he said severely, “I protest against that suggestion.”

Rossiter smiled blandly. “Right. You’ve done your duty to your client and to the proprieties. Now we’ll get down to facts.”

“But anyhow, Hubert, don’t forget what this girl is. She plays on her demureness. It’s Mary’s winning card.”

“A nunnery’s the place for her sort of demureness. In the theater a woman only scores by demureness when it’s known to the right people that she’s a devil off the stage.”

“No! No,” cried Chown. “You—”

“The theater is a place of illusion, my friend. In any case, Mary’s been doing flappers too long. She’s getting old.”

“You’re simply being perverse, Hubert.” Mr. Chown was genuinely angry. “Mary Arden old!”

“Then,” said Rossiter, “she began young and it comes to the same thing. What’s a play-going generation? Five years? Very well, for a generation of playgoers she’s been doing demure flappers and it’s time she did something else and time somebody else did the flappers. And can she do anything else? Can she? I’ll tell you in one word what’s the matter with Mary—virginity.”

Mr. Chown could only bow his head in sorrowing agreement. “She is immoderate,” he said gloomily and Rossiter stared at him, finding the adjective surprising until, “‘Everything in moderation, including virginity,’” quoted Chown.

“Is that your own?” asked Rossiter with relish.

But Chown disclaimed originality and even personal knowledge of his mot’s authorship. He did not read books. He read life and, especially on Thursdays, the Daily Telegraph. “The man who said it to me said it was Samuel Butler’s.”

“It’s good,” pronounced Rossiter, writing the name down. “I’ll get Drayton to write to this man Butler and see if he’ll do me a libretto. I like his flavor.”

“I’m afraid he’s dead,” said Chown.

“Oh, this war!” grieved Rossiter. “This awful war! Is it to take all our promising young men? Well, to come back to Mary. I want to cast her for Teresa and now, candidly, she being what she is, can I?”

“No,” agreed Chown.

“There it is! Waste. Constriction of her possibilities. I wish you’d make her see that it’s bad for her art. You and I have to watch over our young women like fathers. You brought this girl to me and I’ve endorsed your judgment so far: but she’s got no future if she doesn’t mend her ways. I’ve been thinking of reviving ‘The Duchess of Dantzic.’”

“For her?” gasped Chown. “Mary to play Sans-Gene?”

“She can sing it, but she can’t act it—yet. If she’s out for marriage, get her married. Marry her yourself. Do something. But a woman who shirks life will never play Sans-GÊne.” Rossiter rose to administer a friendly pat to Chown’s shoulder. “Think it over, old man,” he said earnestly. “Meantime,” he conceded graciously, “I’ll give Teresa to Leslie and Mary can flap once more. But, I warn you, it’s the last time. I’m tired of real demureness. I want real acting.”

Chown hesitated slightly, then “Do you know, I’ve a card up my sleeve about Mary,” he said.

“Then, for God’s sake, play it, my lad. Play it. It’s overdue.”

“What about giving her a character part?”

“Character? That’s not her line. You know as well as I do that we can’t monkey with the public’s expectations. An actress can afford anything except versatility.”

“Listen,” said Chown. “I picked her up in Lancashire and her accent’s amazing. I needn’t remind you that Lancashire is almost as popular on the stage as Ireland. As you said, the theater’s a place of illusion.”

“Did you notice,” asked Rossiter witheringly, “that the scene of this piece is laid in Granada?”

“Does that matter?” asked Chown blandly.

Rossiter was turning over the pages of the script. “Not a bit,” he hardily admitted. “I’ll take the chance, Lexley. We’ll make her Lancashire, and there’s a male part that’ll have to go to Lancashire too. What a pity that chap Butler was killed in the war. He’d have been just the man to write it in.”

“I don’t think he was Lancashire,” said Chown and, in his turn, “Does that matter?” asked Rossiter. “You go and have that talk with Mary and leave me to look after authors. It takes doing nowadays. Surprising what they’ll ask for doing a bit of re-writing. Makes a hole in a ten-pound note if you don’t watch it.”

Chown had a talk, rather than “that” talk, with Mary, omitting, for instance, Rossiter’s recommendation of matrimony as essential to an actress. Experience, with or without marriage lines, might tap an emotional reservoir but, in her case, the experience would certainly go with marriage and Chown had suffered too often by the retirement of his successful clients after marriage to risk advising it. He considered Rossiter incautious. “There’s a part for you in ‘Granada the Gay,’” he told her, “that is going to make you a new reputation. A Lancashire part and London will think you’re acting it. You and I know you are it, but we won’t mention that.”

“This is interesting,” said Mary Ellen with shining eyes. “I’ll work at this. I’ll show them something.”

Chown nodded, satisfied that she would, in fact, “show them” enough to silence Rossiter’s murmurings for the next two years—nobody looked for a shorter run than that from a musical comedy in war time—and Rossiter was indeed ungrudging in his admission that Mary’s demure Lancastrian, with the terrific and accurate accent coming with such rugged veracity from those pretty lips, was the success of “Granada the Gay.” People were going with scant selectiveness to all theaters alike, but there were a few, and the Galaxy among them, which had their special lure.

It was a curiosity of the time, full though the theaters were, that advance bookings were low. No one could see ahead, no one’s time was his own and perhaps that was the reason or perhaps it was only the sentiment which underlay the practice of going impulsively to theaters without the solemnity of premeditation involved in booking seats many days ahead; and the two young officers, sitting down to dinner, were not remarkable in expecting at that late hour to get stalls at any theater they pleased. “Libraries”—that curious misnomer of the ticket agencies—perhaps kept up their sleeves a parcel of certainly saleable tickets for the benefit of abrupt men in khaki, but libraries were crowded places to be avoided by those who had the officering habit of telling some one else to do the tedious little things.

“We might go on to a show after this,” said Derek Carton. “Don’t you think so, Fairy? Waiter, send a page with the theater list. I want tickets for something.”

His companion, only arrived that day from France, let his eyes stray sensuously over the appointments of the restaurant. He was to eat in a room decorated in emulation of a palace at Versailles; the chefs were French; the guests, when they were not American, were of every allied or neutral European nationality; the band played jazz music; and to the marrow of him, as he contemplated the ornate evidences of materialistic civilization, he exulted in his England. The hardship was that he couldn’t spend the whole of this leave in London: he must go, to-morrow, to Staithley. He was, he had been for six months, Sir Rupert Hepplestall, but when his father died the 1918 German push was on and leave impossible. Decidedly he must go North, this time, this once, though—oh, hang the Hepplestalls! Why couldn’t they let him go quietly, to look in decent privacy at his father’s grave? But no: they must make him a director of the firm and they must call a meeting for him to attend. Well-meaning but absurd old men who had not or who would not see that Rupert was free of Hepplestall’s now. Sincerely he mourned his father’s death, and they wouldn’t let him be simple about it, they complicated a fellow’s pilgrimage to Sir Philip’s grave by their obtuse attempt to thrust his feet into Sir Philip’s shoes.

That needn’t matter to-night, though, that sour affront to the idea of leave: it was his complication not Carton’s who, good man, had met him at the station. Like Rupert, Carton had gone from Cambridge to the war, then he had lost a leg and now had a job at the War Office: and the jolly thing was that Carton hadn’t altered, he was as he used to be even to calling Rupert by that old nickname. If you have seventy-three inches you are naturally called Fairy and out there nobody ever thought of calling you anything else except on frigidly official occasions. But you were never quite sure of the home point of view; the thing called war-mind made such amazing rabid asses of the people who were not fighting and you weren’t certain even of Carton and now you were a little ashamed of having been uncertain. Of course, old Carton would not rot him about his title; of course, he would call him Fairy, he wouldn’t allude to that baronetcy of which Rupert was still so shy.

“Stop dreaming, Fairy,” said Derek, and he looked across the table to find a page-boy at Derek’s elbow and a theater-list on the table before him. “What shall it be?”

“Oh, Robey, I suppose.”

“Yes,” Derek agreed. “Usually Robey’s first choice. Just now, it’s Robey or ‘Granada the Gay,’ with a girl called Arden.”

“You’re in charge,” said Rupert. “I’ve heard of Mary Arden.”

Derek tried not to look superior. “It’s usual,” he said. “Galaxy Theater, boy,” and presently received a pink slip of paper entitling him to the occupancy of two stalls that night. Nothing would have surprised him more than not to have received it, an hour before the curtain rose on a musical comedy in the first flush of brilliant success.

They ate and mostly their talk was superficial. It preserved a superficial air when men who had been killed were spoken of and only once did there seem divergence in their points of view. Some technical point of gunnery came up and Derek, who was at the War Office, agreed that “We can’t improve it yet. But I tell you, old man, in the next war—”

“That—that was a topping Turkish Bath we went to before dinner,” said Rupert.

Derek stared. “What!” he gasped.

“I’m changing the subject,” said Rupert with a smile of forgiveness for his friend who had been home too long, too near to the newspapers and the War Office. At the Front, they didn’t talk of the next war, they were fighting the last of the wars. But he didn’t want argument with Derek to-night. “Are you through that liqueur?” he asked. “Let’s go on to this theater, shall we?”

Rossiter could not and did not expect his commissionaires to emulate the silky suppleness of cosmopolitan head waiters, but it was impressed upon them that they were not policemen on point duty but the servants of a gentleman receiving their master’s guests; he neglected nothing, “producing” the front of the house as he produced the entertainment on the stage or the business organization in his office. It was whispered to husbands that his most exquisite achievement was the ladies’ cloak-room. You might leave your restaurant savage at the bill, but by the time you had progressed from the Galaxy entrance to your stall, you were so saluted, blarneyed, caressed, that there was no misanthropy in you.

It captivated Rupert; he couldn’t, try as he would, duplicate Derek’s stylish air of matter-of-fact boredom. Yesterday he was in hell and to-morrow, very likely, he would swear if the waiter at the hotel brought up tepid tea to his bedside; but to-night he hadn’t made adjustments, to-night he was impressible by amenity. And he had read in the papers that London had grown unmannerly! Outrageous libel on an earthly paradise.

But it may be hazarded that first steps, even in paradise, are not sure-footed, and in spite of his bodily ease, and the “atmosphere” of Mr. Rossiter’s stalls and his eagerness to be amused, his mind, accustomed to the grotesque convention, war, did not immediately accept the grotesque convention, musical comedy. In a day or two he would, no doubt, be as greedy of unreality as any believer in the fantastic untruths distributed to the Press by the War Office propaganda departments, but he was too lately come to Cloud Cuckoo Land to have sloughed his sanity yet. He had yearned for color and he had it now; and the vivid glare of a Rossiter musical comedy put an intolerable strain upon his eyes, while the humor of the comedians put his brain in chancery. Home-grown jokes, he supposed, and yet their mess had fancied itself at wit. He was regretful that he had not insisted on Robey. Robey was the skilled liaison officer between Front and Leave. Robey jerked one’s thoughts irresistibly into the right groove at once; he wouldn’t have sat under Robey wilting to the dismal conviction that his first evening on leave was turning to failure.

Then, from off-stage, a girl began to speak, and Rupert sat taut in his stall. He all but rose and stood to attention as Mary Arden appeared in the character of that inapposite Lancastrian in Granada. She did not merely salt the meat for him; there was no meat but her. He thought that, then blushed at the coarseness of a metaphor which compared this girl with meat. She spoke in the dialect of Lancashire and where he had been dull to the humor of the comedians, all was crystal now. Boredom left him; the morose sentiment of a ruined evening melted like cloud in the sunshine of Mary Arden; phoenixlike leave rose again to the level of anticipation and beyond.

Tell him that he was ravished because she reminded him of Staithley, and he would not have denied that he was ravished but he would have denied very hotly that Staithley had anything to do with it. Suggest that he was seized and held because she spoke a dialect which was his as well as hers, and he would have denied knowledge of a single dialect word. But Rupert was born in Staithley where dialect, like smoke, is in the air and inescapable and Mary was calling to something so deep in him that he did not know he had it, his love of Lancashire covered up and locked beneath his school, Cambridge, the Army. She turned the key, she sent him back to the language he spoke in boyhood, not in the nursery or the schoolroom, but in emancipated hours in the garage and the stables where dialect prevailed. Obstinate in his creed of hatred of the Lancashire of the Hepplestalls, he did not know what she had done to him, but he felt for Mary the intimacy of old, tried acquaintanceship. He was unconscious of others on the stage, even as background: he was unconscious of being in a theater at all and sat gaping when the curtain cut him off from her and Derek began to push past him with an impatient “Buck up. Just time for a drink before they close. Always a scram in the bar. Come along.”

“But,” said Rupert still sitting, still stupidly resenting the intrusion of the curtain, “but—Mary Arden.”

“If that’s the trouble, I’ll take you round and introduce you afterwards. Anything, so long as we don’t miss this drink.”

Derek led his friend to the bar, where there was opportunity for Rupert, amongst a thirsting thrusting mob, to revise his estimate of London manners in war-time. When they had secured whiskies, “You know her!” Rupert said, jealous for the first time of Derek’s enforced home-service.

“I’ve met her once,” said Derek. “That’s a good enough basis for introducing you, to an actress. But I might as well warn you. Mary’s as good as her reputation. A lot of men have wasted time making sure of that.”

“I see,” said Rupert curtly. “But you’ll introduce me.”

“Yes,” said Derek, “if you insist.” He had brought Rupert to the Galaxy because it was the thing to do, just as he had met Mary for the same reason, but he resented her strangeness. To Derek an actress who was not only notoriously but actually “straight” was simply not playing the game and he was reluctant to add Rupert to the train of her exhibited and deluded admirers. Whereas Rupert would have shrunk aghast at the temerity of his thoughts if he had realized Mary as an actress and a famous one. He was, in all modesty, seeing her possessively because she and he were alone in a crowd.

He had to mar with Lancashire this leave which had suddenly turned so glamorous; there was the more reason, then, for boldness, for grasping firmly the opportunity presented by Carton’s introduction, but it troubled him to shyness to think that he had so greatly the advantage of her. He had watched her for three hours and she hadn’t seen him yet. It seemed to him unfair.

His first impression, as her dressing-room door opened to Derek and he looked over his friend’s shoulder, was of cool white walls and chintz hangings. The gilt Empire chairs, relics of a forgotten Rossiter production, which furnished the cell-like room as if it were a great lady’s prison de luxe in bygone France, added in some indefinable way to its femininity. The hangings bulged disconcertingly over clothing.

In his stall he had established that he knew her, but this seemed too abrupt a plunge into her intimacy. She sat, with her back to him, at a table littered with mysteries, and her hair hung loosely down her white silk dressing-gown. He turned away, with burning face, only to find in that room of mirrors no place to which to turn. Carton, that lump of ice, was unaffected, and so was Mary herself who continued, messily, to remove grease-paint from her face with vaseline and a vigorous towel while she gave Carton, sideways, an oily hand. She was not incommoding herself for a man she hardly remembered.

“Weren’t there two of you when you came in?” she asked and Derek realized that Rupert had fled. “Fairy!” he called, and opened the door. “Come in, man.”

Mary laughed. “Fairy?” she said. “You’ve a quaint name. Fairy by name and nature. Fairies disappear.”

He was distressingly embarrassed. Carton had, merely instinctively, called him by the usual nickname, and was he, to escape her gay quizzing, to draw himself up grandly and to say that he wasn’t Fairy but Sir Rupert? “Fairy” set her first impressions against him, but to attempt their correction by announcing that he had a title might, by its pompousness, only turn bad to worse. Better, for the moment, let it slide. He smiled gallantly. “When I disappear again,” he said, “it will be because you tell me to.” He cursed his unreadiness to rise above the level of idiocy.

“Do you know, Miss Arden, Fairy comes from Lancashire,” said Derek, by way of magnanimously helping a lame dog over a stile.

“Does he?” said Mary listlessly. She could see in her glass without turning round his large supple frame and his handsome face which would, she thought, look better without the conventional mustache. She placed men quickly now. Well-bred, this boy, gentle. Too gentle? Probably not. Big men were apt to be gentle through very consciousness of strength, and he was graceful for all his size. “Fairy” would do: decidedly he would do to replace as her decorative companion across restaurant tables her latest cavalier who had just gone back to France.

“Oh,” he was saying, “it won’t interest Miss Arden that I come from Lancashire.”

“Well,” she said, hinting a gulf impassable between North and South, “I’m a London actress.”

“That’s the miracle of it,” he said. “Lancashire’s an old slag-heap of a county and one couldn’t be proud of it. Only, by Jove, I am, since hearing you. It’s queer, but when you spoke Lancashire it was as if I met an old friend I hadn’t seen for a long time. I know it’s awful cheek, Miss Arden, but it seemed to put me on an equality with you.”

She did not know he was a Hepplestall, she missed the poignant irony of their identities, but when Sir Rupert haltingly told her that it was “awful cheek” in him to feel on an equality with the exalted Mary Ellen Bradshaw, she had, unusually, the thought that she ought to check this absurd diffidence by blurting out that she learned her Lancashire on Staithley Streets, that she was not acting but was the real, raw thing. It was not often, these days, that Mary blushed to accept homage. She hadn’t put herself, the times, the strange perverted times, had put her on a pinnacle and, being there, she did what men seemed gratified that she should do, she looked down on them. But because she kept her head, she had not resented, she had welcomed, the one or two occasions when she had been made to feel ashamed. There was a man, now dead, whom she recalled because Rupert was making her in the same way look at herself through a diminishing-glass. He had, unlike the most, talked to her of the things they were doing over there: he had told her in a matter-of-fact way of their daily life and she had made comparisons with hers, she had dwindled to her true dimensions. And Rupert by means she couldn’t analyze was giving a similar, salutary experience. She felt shrunken before him and was happy to shrink.

Derek’s formula for the correct welcome of a fighting soldier on leave included supper at a night club, and they were wasting time on the impossible woman. “I expect you want to turn us out so that you can dress,” he cut in.

“Oh!” cried Rupert, alarmed at the idea of going so pat upon their coming. “But—yes, I suppose you must. Only I—” he took courage, if it wasn’t desperation, in both hands and added, “Will you lunch with me to-morrow at the Carlton?”

She pretended to consult a full engagement-book. “I might just manage it,” she grudged defensively. Though he shrank her and she realized being shrunk by him, he was not to think that lunch with Mary Arden was less than a high privilege.

He took that view himself. “I shall be greatly honored,” he said sincerely: then Derek hustled him away, but not to the night club. Rupert resisted that anti-climax, he who had held Mary’s hand in his, “But I’m so grateful to you, Derek,” he emphasized.

“Are you? Then don’t be ungrateful if I tell you that no one’s quite sane on leave,” and sane or not, Rupert went to bed in the elated mood of a man who knows he has created something. “Like a hen clucking over an egg,” was Derek’s private-comment on his friend.