book-shelves, discovered that scarcely any work they contained was complete; but this did not seem to trouble the readers, who continued to feed their leisure with mutilated fiction, from which they occasionally raised their eyes to glance mistrustfully at the new arrival sweeping the garden gravel with her frivolous draperies.  The inmates of the hotel were of different nationalities, but their racial differences were levelled by the stamp of a common mediocrity.  All differences of tongue, of custom, of physiognomy, disappeared in this deep community of insignificance, which was like some secret bond, with the manifold signs and pass-words of its ignorances and its imperceptions.  It was not the heterogeneous mediocrity of the American summer hotel where the lack of any standard is the nearest approach to a tie, but an organized codified dulness, in conscious possession of its rights, and strong in the voluntary ignorance of any others.

It took Undine a long time to accustom herself to such an atmosphere, and meanwhile she fretted, fumed and flaunted, or abandoned herself to long periods of fruitless brooding.  Sometimes a flame of anger shot up in her, dismally illuminating the path she had travelled and the blank wall to which it led.  At other moments past and present were enveloped in a dull fog of rancour which distorted and faded even the image she presented to her morning mirror.  There were days when every young face she saw left in her a taste of poison.  But when she compared herself with the specimens of her sex who plied their languid industries under the palms, or looked away as she passed them in hall or staircase, her spirits rose, and she rang for her maid and dressed herself in her newest and vividest.  These were unprofitable triumphs, however.  She never made one of her attacks on the organized disapproval of the community without feeling she had lost ground by it; and the next day she would lie in bed and send down capricious orders for food, which her maid would presently remove untouched, with instructions to transmit her complaints to the landlord.

Sometimes the events of the past year, ceaselessly revolving through her brain, became no longer a subject for criticism or justification but simply a series of pictures monotonously unrolled.  Hour by hour, in such moods, she re-lived the incidents of her flight with Peter Van Degen:  the part of her career that, since it had proved a failure, seemed least like herself and most difficult to justify.  She had gone away with him, and had lived with him for two months:  she, Undine Marvell, to whom respectability was the breath of life, to whom such follies had always been unintelligible and therefore inexcusable.—­She had done this incredible thing, and she had done it from a motive that seemed, at the time, as clear, as logical, as free from the distorting mists of sentimentality, as any of her father’s financial enterprises.  It had been a bold move, but it had been as carefully