From his balcony he looked down on the assembling party.  Mrs. Shallum was already screaming bilingually at various windows in the long facade; and Undine presently came out of the hotel with the Marchese Roviano and two young English diplomatists.  Slim and tall in her trim mountain garb, she made the ornate Mrs. Shallum look like a piece of ambulant upholstery.  The high air brightened her cheeks and struck new lights from her hair, and Ralph had never seen her so touched with morning freshness.  The party was not yet complete, and he felt a movement of annoyance when he recognized, in the last person to join it, a Russian lady of cosmopolitan notoriety whom he had run across in his unmarried days, and as to whom he had already warned Undine.  Knowing what strange specimens from the depths slip through the wide meshes of the watering-place world, he had foreseen that a meeting with the Baroness Adelschein was inevitable; but he had not expected her to become one of his wife’s intimate circle.

When the excursionists had started he turned back to his writing-table and tried to take up his work; but he could not fix his thoughts:  they were far away, in pursuit of Undine.  He had been but five months married, and it seemed, after all, rather soon for him to be dropped out of such excursions as unquestioningly as poor Harvey Shallum.  He smiled away this first twinge of jealousy, but the irritation it left found a pretext in his displeasure at Undine’s choice of companions.  Mrs. Shallum grated on his taste, but she was as open to inspection as a shop-window, and he was sure that time would teach his wife the cheapness of what she had to show.  Roviano and the Englishmen were well enough too:  frankly bent on amusement, but pleasant and well-bred.  But they would naturally take their tone from the women they were with; and Madame Adelschein’s tone was notorious.  He knew also that Undine’s faculty of self-defense was weakened by the instinct of adapting herself to whatever company she was in, of copying “the others” in speech and gesture as closely as she reflected them in dress; and he was disturbed by the thought of what her ignorance might expose her to.

She came back late, flushed with her long walk, her face all sparkle and mystery, as he had seen it in the first days of their courtship; and the look somehow revived his irritated sense of having been intentionally left out of the party.

“You’ve been gone forever.  Was it the Adelschein who made you go such lengths?” he asked her, trying to keep to his usual joking tone.

Undine, as she dropped down on the sofa and unpinned her hat, shed on him the light of her guileless gaze.

“I don’t know:  everybody was amusing.  The Marquis is awfully bright.”

“I’d no idea you or Bertha Shallum knew Madame Adelschein well enough to take her off with you in that way.”

Undine sat absently smoothing the tuft of glossy cock’s-feathers in her hat.