Mrs. Fairford smiled.  “I’ve sometimes thought,” she mused, “that Mr. Popple must be the only gentleman I know; at least he’s the only man who has ever told me he was a gentleman—­and Mr. Popple never fails to mention it.”

Undine’s ear was too well attuned to the national note of irony for her not to perceive that her companions were making sport of the painter.  She winced at their banter as if it had been at her own expense, yet it gave her a dizzy sense of being at last in the very stronghold of fashion.  Her attention was diverted by hearing Mrs. Van Degen, under cover of the general laugh, say in a low tone to young Marvell:  “I thought you liked his things, or I wouldn’t have had him paint me.”

Something in her tone made all Undine’s perceptions bristle, and she strained her ears for the answer.

“I think he’ll do you capitally—­you must let me come and see some day soon.”  Marvell’s tone was always so light, so unemphasized, that she could not be sure of its being as indifferent as it sounded.  She looked down at the fruit on her plate and shot a side-glance through her lashes at Mrs. Peter Van Degen.

Mrs. Van Degen was neither beautiful nor imposing:  just a dark girlish-looking creature with plaintive eyes and a fidgety frequent laugh.  But she was more elaborately dressed and jewelled than the other ladies, and her elegance and her restlessness made her seem less alien to Undine.  She had turned on Marvell a gaze at once pleading and possessive; but whether betokening merely an inherited intimacy (Undine had noticed that they were all more or less cousins) or a more personal feeling, her observer was unable to decide; just as the tone of the young man’s reply might have expressed the open avowal of good-fellowship or the disguise of a different sentiment.  All was blurred and puzzling to the girl in this world of half-lights, half-tones, eliminations and abbreviations; and she felt a violent longing to brush away the cobwebs and assert herself as the dominant figure of the scene.

Yet in the drawing-room, with the ladies, where Mrs. Fairford came and sat by her, the spirit of caution once more prevailed.  She wanted to be noticed but she dreaded to be patronized, and here again her hostess’s gradations of tone were confusing.  Mrs. Fairford made no tactless allusions to her being a newcomer in New York—­there was nothing as bitter to the girl as that—­but her questions as to what pictures had interested Undine at the various exhibitions of the moment, and which of the new books she had read, were almost as open to suspicion, since they had to be answered in the negative.  Undine did not even know that there were any pictures to be seen, much less that “people” went to see them; and she had read no new book but “When The Kissing Had to Stop,” of which Mrs. Fairford seemed not to have heard.  On the theatre they were equally at odds, for while Undine had seen “Oolaloo” fourteen times, and was “wild” about Ned