No question could have been less welcome to Undine.  If there was one point on which she was doggedly and puritanically resolved, it was that no extremes of social adversity should ever again draw her into the group of people among whom Madame Adelschein too conspicuously figured.  Since her unsuccessful attempt to win over Indiana by introducing her to that group, Undine had been righteously resolved to remain aloof from it; and she was drawing herself up to her loftiest height of disapproval when the stranger, as if unconscious of it, went on:  “Sacha speaks of you so often—­she admires you so much.—­I think you know also my cousin Chelles,” she added, looking into Undine’s eyes.  “I am the Princess Estradina.  I’ve come here with my mother for the air.”

The murmur of negation died on Undine’s lips.  She found herself grappling with a new social riddle, and such surprises were always stimulating.  The name of the untidy-looking young woman she had been about to repel was one of the most eminent in the impregnable quarter beyond the Seine.  No one figured more largely in the Parisian chronicle than the Princess Estradina, and no name more impressively headed the list at every marriage, funeral and philanthropic entertainment of the Faubourg Saint Germain than that of her mother, the Duchesse de Dordogne, who must be no other than the old woman sitting in the Bath-chair with the crumpled bonnet and the ridiculous sunshade.

But it was not the appearance of the two ladies that surprised Undine.  She knew that social gold does not always glitter, and that the lady she had heard spoken of as Lili Estradina was notoriously careless of the conventions; but that she should boast of her intimacy with Madame Adelschein, and use it as a pretext for naming herself, overthrew all Undine’s hierarchies.

“Yes—­it’s hideously dull here, and I’m dying of it.  Do come over and speak to my mother.  She’s dying of it too; but don’t tell her so, because she hasn’t found it out.  There were so many things our mothers never found out,” the Princess rambled on, with her half-mocking half-intimate smile; and in another moment Undine, thrilled at having Mrs. Spragg thus coupled with a Duchess, found herself seated between mother and daughter, and responding by a radiant blush to the elder lady’s amiable opening:  “You know my nephew Raymond—­he’s your great admirer.”

How had it happened, whither would it lead, how long could it last?  The questions raced through Undine’s brain as she sat listening to her new friends—­they seemed already too friendly to be called acquaintances!—­replying to their enquiries, and trying to think far enough ahead to guess what they would expect her to say, and what tone it would be well to take.  She was used to such feats of mental agility, and it was instinctive with her to become, for the moment, the person she thought her interlocutors expected her to be; but she had never had quite so new a part to play at such