“You don’t understand.” (It was an undoubted relief to be able, at last, to say that to Indiana!) “Clare Van Degen thinks divorce wrong—­or rather awfully vulgar.”

“Vulgar?” Indiana flamed.  “If that isn’t just too much!  A woman who’s in love with another woman’s husband?  What does she think refined, I’d like to know?  Having a lover, I suppose—­like the women in these nasty French plays?  I’ve told Mr. Rolliver I won’t go to the theatre with him again in Paris—­it’s too utterly low.  And the swell society’s just as bad:  it’s simply rotten.  Thank goodness I was brought up in a place where there’s some sense of decency left!” She looked compassionately at Undine.  “It was New York that demoralized you—­and I don’t blame you for it.  Out at Apex you’d have acted different.  You never never would have given way to your feelings before you’d got your divorce.”

A slow blush rose to Undine’s forehead.

“He seemed so unhappy—­” she murmured.

“Oh, I know!” said Indiana in a tone of cold competence.  She gave Undine an impatient glance.  “What was the understanding between you, when you left Europe last August to go out to Dakota?”

“Peter was to go to Reno in the autumn—­so that it wouldn’t look too much as if we were acting together.  I was to come to Chicago to see him on his way out there.”

“And he never came?”

“No.”

“And he stopped writing?”

“Oh, he never writes.”

Indiana heaved a deep sigh of intelligence.  “There’s one perfectly clear rule:  never let out of your sight a man who doesn’t write.”

“I know.  That’s why I stayed with him—­those few weeks last summer....”

Indiana sat thinking, her fine shallow eyes fixed unblinkingly on her friend’s embarrassed face.

“I suppose there isn’t anybody else—?”

“Anybody—?”

“Well—­now you’ve got your divorce:  anybody else it would come in handy for?”

This was harder to bear than anything that had gone before:  Undine could not have borne it if she had not had a purpose.  “Mr. Van Degen owes it to me—­” she began with an air of wounded dignity.

“Yes, yes:  I know.  But that’s just talk.  If there is anybody else—­”

“I can’t imagine what you think of me, Indiana!”

Indiana, without appearing to resent this challenge, again lost herself in meditation.

“Well, I’ll tell him he’s just got to see you,” she finally emerged from it to say.

Undine gave a quick upward look:  this was what she had been waiting for ever since she had read, a few days earlier, in the columns of her morning journal, that Mr. Peter Van Degen and Mr. and Mrs. James J. Rolliver had been fellow-passengers on board the Semantic.  But she did not betray her expectations by as much as the tremor of an eye-lash.  She knew her friend well enough to pour out to her the expected tribute of surprise.