“I don’t see that you’ve got to know people particularly well to go for a walk with them.  The Baroness is awfully bright too.”

She always gave her acquaintances their titles, seeming not, in this respect, to have noticed that a simpler form prevailed.

“I don’t dispute the interest of what she says; but I’ve told you what decent people think of what she does,” Ralph retorted, exasperated by what seemed a wilful pretense of ignorance.

She continued to scrutinize him with her clear eyes, in which there was no shadow of offense.

“You mean they don’t want to go round with her?  You’re mistaken:  it’s not true.  She goes round with everybody.  She dined last night with the Grand Duchess; Roviano told me so.”

This was not calculated to make Ralph take a more tolerant view of the question.

“Does he also tell you what’s said of her?”

“What’s said of her?” Undine’s limpid glance rebuked him.  “Do you mean that disgusting scandal you told me about?  Do you suppose I’d let him talk to me about such things?  I meant you’re mistaken about her social position.  He says she goes everywhere.”

Ralph laughed impatiently.  “No doubt Roviano’s an authority; but it doesn’t happen to be his business to choose your friends for you.”

Undine echoed his laugh.  “Well, I guess I don’t need anybody to do that:  I can do it myself,” she said, with the good-humoured curtness that was the habitual note of intercourse with the Spraggs.

Ralph sat down beside her and laid a caressing touch on her shoulder.  “No, you can’t, you foolish child.  You know nothing of this society you’re in; of its antecedents, its rules, its conventions; and it’s my affair to look after you, and warn you when you’re on the wrong track.”

“Mercy, what a solemn speech!” She shrugged away his hand without ill-temper.  “I don’t believe an American woman needs to know such a lot about their old rules.  They can see I mean to follow my own, and if they don’t like it they needn’t go with me.”

“Oh, they’ll go with you fast enough, as you call it.  They’ll be too charmed to.  The question is how far they’ll make you go with them, and where they’ll finally land you.”

She tossed her head back with the movement she had learned in “speaking” school-pieces about freedom and the British tyrant.

“No one’s ever yet gone any farther with me than I wanted!” she declared.  She was really exquisitely simple.

“I’m not sure Roviano hasn’t, in vouching for Madame Adelschein.  But he probably thinks you know about her.  To him this isn’t ‘society’ any more than the people in an omnibus are.  Society, to everybody here, means the sanction of their own special group and of the corresponding groups elsewhere.  The Adelschein goes about in a place like this because it’s nobody’s business to stop her; but the women who tolerate her here would drop her like a shot if she set foot on their own ground.”