Undine had been perfectly sincere in telling Indiana Rolliver that she was not “an Immoral woman.”  The pleasures for which her sex took such risks had never attracted her, and she did not even crave the excitement of having it thought that they did.  She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life:  amusement and respectability; and despite her surface-sophistication her notion of amusement was hardly less innocent than when she had hung on the plumber’s fence with Indiana Frusk.  It gave her, therefore, no satisfaction to find herself included among Madame Adelschein’s intimates.  It embarrassed her to feel that she was expected to be “queer” and “different,” to respond to pass-words and talk in innuendo, to associate with the equivocal and the subterranean and affect to despise the ingenuous daylight joys which really satisfied her soul.  But the business shrewdness which was never quite dormant in her suggested that this was not the moment for such scruples.  She must make the best of what she could get and wait her chance of getting something better; and meanwhile the most practical use to which she could put her shady friends was to flash their authentic nobility in the dazzled eyes of Mrs. Rolliver.

With this object in view she made haste, in a fashionable tea-room of the rue de Rivoli, to group about Indiana the most titled members of the band; and the felicity of the occasion would have been unmarred had she not suddenly caught sight of Raymond de Chelles sitting on the other side of the room.

She had not seen Chelles since her return to Paris.  It had seemed preferable to leave their meeting to chance and the present chance might have served as well as another but for the fact that among his companions were two or three of the most eminent ladies of the proud quarter beyond the Seine.  It was what Undine, in moments of discouragement, characterized as “her luck” that one of these should be the hated Miss Wincher of Potash Springs, who had now become the Marquise de Trezac.  Undine knew that Chelles and his compatriots, however scandalized at her European companions, would be completely indifferent to Mrs. Rolliver’s appearance; but one gesture of Madame de Trezac’s eye-glass would wave Indiana to her place and thus brand the whole party as “wrong.”

All this passed through Undine’s mind in the very moment of her noting the change of expression with which Chelles had signalled his recognition.  If their encounter could have occurred in happier conditions it might have had far-reaching results.  As it was, the crowded state of the tea-room, and the distance between their tables, sufficiently excused his restricting his greeting to an eager bow; and Undine went home heavy-hearted from this first attempt to reconstruct her past.