The men, too, were less striking than she had hoped.  She had not expected much of Mr. Fairford, since married men were intrinsically uninteresting, and his baldness and grey moustache seemed naturally to relegate him to the background; but she had looked for some brilliant youths of her own age—­in her inmost heart she had looked for Mr. Popple.  He was not there, however, and of the other men one, whom they called Mr. Bowen, was hopelessly elderly—­she supposed he was the husband of the white-haired lady—­and the other two, who seemed to be friends of young Marvell’s, were both lacking in Claud Walsingham’s dash.

Undine sat between Mr. Bowen and young Marvell, who struck her as very “sweet” (it was her word for friendliness), but even shyer than at the hotel dance.  Yet she was not sure if he were shy, or if his quietness were only a new kind of self-possession which expressed itself negatively instead of aggressively.  Small, well-knit, fair, he sat stroking his slight blond moustache and looking at her with kindly, almost tender eyes; but he left it to his sister and the others to draw her out and fit her into the pattern.

Mrs. Fairford talked so well that the girl wondered why Mrs. Heeny had found her lacking in conversation.  But though Undine thought silent people awkward she was not easily impressed by verbal fluency.  All the ladies in Apex City were more voluble than Mrs. Fairford, and had a larger vocabulary:  the difference was that with Mrs. Fairford conversation seemed to be a concert and not a solo.  She kept drawing in the others, giving each a turn, beating time for them with her smile, and somehow harmonizing and linking together what they said.  She took particular pains to give Undine her due part in the performance; but the girl’s expansive impulses were always balanced by odd reactions of mistrust, and to-night the latter prevailed.  She meant to watch and listen without letting herself go, and she sat very straight and pink, answering promptly but briefly, with the nervous laugh that punctuated all her phrases—­saying “I don’t care if I do” when her host asked her to try some grapes, and “I wouldn’t wonder” when she thought any one was trying to astonish her.

This state of lucidity enabled her to take note of all that was being said.  The talk ran more on general questions, and less on people, than she was used to; but though the allusions to pictures and books escaped her, she caught and stored up every personal reference, and the pink in her cheeks deepened at a random mention of Mr. Popple.

“Yes—­he’s doing me,” Mrs. Peter Van Degen was saying, in her slightly drawling voice.  “He’s doing everybody this year, you know—­”

“As if that were a reason!” Undine heard Mrs. Fairford breathe to Mr. Bowen; who replied, at the same pitch:  “It’s a Van Degen reason, isn’t it?”—­to which Mrs. Fairford shrugged assentingly.

“That delightful Popple—­he paints so exactly as he talks!” the white-haired lady took it up.  “All his portraits seem to proclaim what a gentleman he is, and how he fascinates women!  They’re not pictures of Mrs. or Miss So-and-so, but simply of the impression Popple thinks he’s made on them.”