“Well, that kind of dress might come in mighty handy on some occasions; so I guess you’d better hold on to it for future use, and go and select another for this Fairford dinner,” he said; and before he could finish he was in her arms again, and she was smothering his last word in little cries and kisses.

III

Though she would not for the world have owned it to her parents, Undine was disappointed in the Fairford dinner.

The house, to begin with, was small and rather shabby.  There was no gilding, no lavish diffusion of light:  the room they sat in after dinner, with its green-shaded lamps making faint pools of brightness, and its rows of books from floor to ceiling, reminded Undine of the old circulating library at Apex, before the new marble building was put up.  Then, instead of a gas-log, or a polished grate with electric bulbs behind ruby glass, there was an old-fashioned wood-fire, like pictures of “Back to the farm for Christmas”; and when the logs fell forward Mrs. Pairford or her brother had to jump up to push them in place, and the ashes scattered over the hearth untidily.

The dinner too was disappointing.  Undine was too young to take note of culinary details, but she had expected to view the company through a bower of orchids and eat pretty-coloured entrees in ruffled papers.  Instead, there was only a low centre-dish of ferns, and plain roasted and broiled meat that one could recognize—­as if they’d been dyspeptics on a diet!  With all the hints in the Sunday papers, she thought it dull of Mrs. Fairford not to have picked up something newer; and as the evening progressed she began to suspect that it wasn’t a real “dinner party,” and that they had just asked her in to share what they had when they were alone.

But a glance about the table convinced her that Mrs. Fairford could not have meant to treat her other guests so lightly.  They were only eight in number, but one was no less a person than young Mrs. Peter Van Degen—­the one who had been a Dagonet—­and the consideration which this young lady, herself one of the choicest ornaments of the Society Column, displayed toward the rest of the company, convinced Undine that they must be more important than they looked.  She liked Mrs. Fairford, a small incisive woman, with a big nose and good teeth revealed by frequent smiles.  In her dowdy black and antiquated ornaments she was not what Undine would have called “stylish”; but she had a droll kind way which reminded the girl of her father’s manner when he was not tired or worried about money.  One of the other ladies, having white hair, did not long arrest Undine’s attention; and the fourth, a girl like herself, who was introduced as Miss Harriet Ray, she dismissed at a glance as plain and wearing a last year’s “model.”