As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration.  He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas.  Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes?  It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie....

“Oh, thank you,” she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat in hand, saying sociably: 

“The crowd’s simply awful, isn’t it?”

At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a tap of her wand, and a careless “Peter, look at this,” swept him to the other side of the gallery.

Undine’s heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had identified him.  Peter Van Degen—­who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell’s cousin, the hero of “Sunday Supplements,” the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and “crack” sloops:  the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column?  Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her—­it almost consoled her for his wife’s indifference!

When she reached home she found that she could not remember anything about the pictures she had seen...

There was no message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in.  Of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel?  She would probably never meet Peter Van Degen again—­or, if she did run across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue their conversation without being “introduced.”  What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited?

Her gloom was not lightened by finding Ralph Marvell’s card on the drawing-room table.  She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment:  it seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance.  But as she tossed the card aside her mother said:  “He was real sorry not to see you.  Undine—­he sat here nearly an hour.”

Undine’s attention was roused.  “Sat here—­all alone?  Didn’t you tell him I was out?”

“Yes—­but he came up all the same.  He asked for me.”

“Asked for you?”

The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine’s feet.  A visitor who asked for a girl’s mother!—­she stared at Mrs. Spragg with cold incredulity.  “What makes you think he did?”