Clarehaven had reappeared without a word of warning, and in a note that he sent round to invite Dorothy and a friend to supper he seemed quite unconscious that there was anything in his behavior to be excused. He hoped that she had not forgotten him, as if his silence of nearly a year was perfectly natural; he mentioned that Lonsdale was with him, congratulated her upon her singing in the sextet, and begged for an answer to be sent down to the stage-door. Somehow it was not very difficult for Dorothy to forgive him, and she accepted the invitation. The obvious friend to have taken out with her would have been Olive Fanshawe, because Olive was a brunette and Queenie was not. However, if Clarehaven was capable of being even temporarily fascinated by another girl's outward charms, Dorothy felt that she might as well give him up at once; she did not intend her life to be spoiled by beauty competitions. Dorothy wanted to impress Clarehaven more deeply than with the skin-deep loveliness that belonged in her own style as much to Olive as to herself, and in order to impress him she felt that a moral contrast would be more effective than the hackneyed contrast between brunette and blonde. Of course, she did not mean the kind of moral contrast that Lily had provided on that dreadful afternoon in Oxford; that had been merely a painful exhibition of vulgarity. Olive was so sweet and good and well behaved that between them they might achieve the insipid, to obviate which Dorothy chose Queenie, who would set off, if not her complexion, at any rate her point of view.
At the end of the evening, when Clarehaven, hesitating for a barely perceptible moment, had said good-by to Dorothy outside Halfmoon Mansions and stepped reproachfully back into his hansom, she decided on her way up-stairs that the supper-party might be considered a success. To begin with, all the other people supping at the Savoy had stared at their table more than at any other. Then, Arthur Lonsdale had evidently taken a fancy to Queenie Molyneux, and if Dorothy was not mistaken Queenie had taken a fancy to him. His way of talking had been just the foil she required for her own, and when they drove away together to Ridgemount Mansions there was no doubt in Dorothy's mind that Lonsdale would tell the cab not to wait and end by missing that last train at Goodge Street. However, what happened to the cab or, for that matter, to Lonsdale and Queenie Molyneux was of slight importance beside the fact that Clarehaven had evidently lost nothing of his admiration for herself, or, if he had lost it, had regained it all and more this evening. When he and his friend compared notes to-morrow how sharply the difference between herself and some other Vanity girls would be brought home to him.