H.E. Bates Companion

Two performers, a young conjurer and a woman past her prime, chance to talk over tea in a train station. The man, sleekly dressed and successful, perceives her as "less like a dancer than an old prostitute, over-dressed and over-painted" but is arrested by a photograph of her at eighteen. Among Bates's early tales, this is one of the few that is unrelated to the country and people of the Midlands. In John O'London's Weekly (November 14, 1931), The Black Boxer Tales (1932), The Bride Comes to Evensford and Other Tales (1949).