“There isn’t a tip I couldn’t have given you—­not one!” Mrs. Rolliver reproachfully repeated; and all Undine’s superiorities and discriminations seemed to shrivel up in the crude blaze of the other’s solid achievement.

There was little comfort in noting, for one’s private delectation, that Indiana spoke of her husband as “Mr. Rolliver,” that she twanged a piercing R, that one of her shoulders was still higher than the other, and that her striking dress was totally unsuited to the hour, the place and the occasion.  She still did and was all that Undine had so sedulously learned not to be and to do; but to dwell on these obstacles to her success was but to be more deeply impressed by the fact that she had nevertheless succeeded.

Not much more than a year had elapsed since Undine Marvell, sitting in the drawing-room of another Parisian hotel, had heard the immense orchestral murmur of Paris rise through the open windows like the ascending movement of her own hopes.  The immense murmur still sounded on, deafening and implacable as some elemental force; and the discord in her fate no more disturbed it than the motor wheels rolling by under the windows were disturbed by the particles of dust that they ground to finer powder as they passed.

“I could have told you one thing right off,” Mrs. Rolliver went on with her ringing energy.  “And that is, to get your divorce first thing.  A divorce is always a good thing to have:  you never can tell when you may want it.  You ought to have attended to that before you even began with Peter Van Degen.”

Undine listened, irresistibly impressed.  “Did you?” she asked; but Mrs. Rolliver, at this, grew suddenly veiled and sibylline.  She wound her big bejewelled hand through her pearls—­there were ropes and ropes of them—­and leaned back, modestly sinking her lids.

“I’m here, anyhow,” she rejoined, with “CIRCUMSPICE!” in look and tone.

Undine, obedient to the challenge, continued to gaze at the pearls.  They were real; there was no doubt about that.  And so was Indiana’s marriage—­if she kept out of certain states.

“Don’t you see,” Mrs. Rolliver continued, “that having to leave him when you did, and rush off to Dakota for six months, was—­was giving him too much time to think; and giving it at the wrong time, too?” “Oh, I see.  But what could I do?  I’m not an immoral woman.”

“Of course not, dearest.  You were merely thoughtless that’s what I meant by saying you ought to have had your divorce ready.”

A flicker of self-esteem caused Undine to protest.  “It wouldn’t have made any difference.  His wife would never have given him up.”

“She’s so crazy about him?”

“No:  she hates him so.  And she hates me too, because she’s in love with my husband.”

Indiana bounced out of her lounging attitude and struck her hands together with a rattle of rings.

“In love with your husband?  What’s the matter, then?  Why on earth didn’t the four of you fix it up together?”