science she had once imagined that Ralph Marvell possessed.  During the three years since her marriage she had learned to make distinctions unknown to her girlish categories.  She had found out that she had given herself to the exclusive and the dowdy when the future belonged to the showy and the promiscuous; that she was in the case of those who have cast in their lot with a fallen cause, or—­to use an analogy more within her range—­who have hired an opera box on the wrong night.  It was all confusing and exasperating.  Apex ideals had been based on the myth of “old families” ruling New York from a throne of Revolutionary tradition, with the new millionaires paying them feudal allegiance.  But experience had long since proved the delusiveness of the simile.  Mrs. Marvell’s classification of the world into the visited and the unvisited was as obsolete as a mediaeval cosmogony.  Some of those whom Washington Square left unvisited were the centre of social systems far outside its ken, and as indifferent to its opinions as the constellations to the reckonings of the astronomers; and all these systems joyously revolved about their central sun of gold.

There were moments after Undine’s return to New York when she was tempted to class her marriage with the hateful early mistakes from the memories of which she had hoped it would free her.  Since it was never her habit to accuse herself of such mistakes it was inevitable that she should gradually come to lay the blame on Ralph.  She found a poignant pleasure, at this stage of her career, in the question:  “What does a young girl know of life?” And the poignancy was deepened by the fact that each of the friends to whom she put the question seemed convinced that—­had the privilege been his—­he would have known how to spare her the disenchantment it implied.

The conviction of having blundered was never more present to her than when, on this particular afternoon, the guests invited by Mr. Popple to view her portrait began to assemble before it.

Some of the principal figures of Undine’s group had rallied for the occasion, and almost all were in exasperating enjoyment of the privileges for which she pined.  There was young Jim Driscoll, heir-apparent of the house, with his short stout mistrustful wife, who hated society, but went everywhere lest it might be thought she had been left out; the “beautiful Mrs. Beringer,” a lovely aimless being, who kept (as Laura Fairford said) a home for stray opinions, and could never quite tell them apart; little Dicky Bowles, whom every one invited because he was understood to “say things” if one didn’t; the Harvey Shallums, fresh from Paris, and dragging in their wake a bewildered nobleman vaguely designated as “the Count,” who offered cautious conversational openings, like an explorer trying beads on savages; and, behind these more salient types, the usual filling in of those who are seen everywhere because they have learned to catch the social eye.