Mrs. Spragg, with a puzzled frown, groped for her eye-glass among the jet fringes of her tightly-girded front.

Mrs. Heeny’s small blue eyes shot out sparks of curiosity.  “Marvell—­what Marvell is that?”

The girl explained languidly:  “A little fellow—­I think Mr. Popple said his name was Ralph”; while her mother continued:  “Undine met them both last night at that party downstairs.  And from something Mr. Popple said to her about going to one of the new plays, she thought—­”

“How on earth do you know what I thought?” Undine flashed back, her grey eyes darting warnings at her mother under their straight black brows.

“Why, you said you thought—­” Mrs. Spragg began reproachfully; but Mrs. Heeny, heedless of their bickerings, was pursuing her own train of thought.

“What Popple?  Claud Walsingham Popple—­the portrait painter?”

“Yes—­I suppose so.  He said he’d like to paint me.  Mabel Lipscomb introduced him.  I don’t care if I never see him again,” the girl said, bathed in angry pink.

“Do you know him, Mrs. Heeny?” Mrs. Spragg enquired.

“I should say I did.  I manicured him for his first society portrait—­a full-length of Mrs. Harmon B. Driscoll.”  Mrs. Heeny smiled indulgently on her hearers.  “I know everybody.  If they don’t know me they ain’t in it, and Claud Walsingham Popple’s in it.  But he ain’t nearly as in it,” she continued judicially, “as Ralph Marvell—­the little fellow, as you call him.”

Undine Spragg, at the word, swept round on the speaker with one of the quick turns that revealed her youthful flexibility.  She was always doubling and twisting on herself, and every movement she made seemed to start at the nape of her neck, just below the lifted roll of reddish-gold hair, and flow without a break through her whole slim length to the tips of her fingers and the points of her slender restless feet.

“Why, do you know the Marvells?  Are they stylish?” she asked.

Mrs. Heeny gave the discouraged gesture of a pedagogue who has vainly striven to implant the rudiments of knowledge in a rebellious mind.

“Why, Undine Spragg, I’ve told you all about them time and again!  His mother was a Dagonet.  They live with old Urban Dagonet down in Washington Square.”

To Mrs. Spragg this conveyed even less than to her daughter, “’way down there?  Why do they live with somebody else?  Haven’t they got the means to have a home of their own?”

Undine’s perceptions were more rapid, and she fixed her eyes searchingly on Mrs. Heeny.

“Do you mean to say Mr. Marvell’s as swell as Mr. Popple?”

“As swell?  Why, Claud Walsingham Popple ain’t in the same class with him!”

The girl was upon her mother with a spring, snatching and smoothing out the crumpled note.

“Laura Fairford—­is that the sister’s name?”

“Mrs. Henley Fairford; yes.  What does she write about?”