Indiana leaned back among her cushions with an embarrassed laugh.
"Oh, my dear, I've been meaning to tell you—it's off, I'm afraid. The dinner is, I mean. You see, Mr. Van Degen has seen you 'round with me, and the very minute I asked him to come and dine he guessed—"
"He guessed—and he wouldn't?"
"Well, no. He wouldn't. I hate to tell you."
"Oh—" Undine threw off a vague laugh. "Since you're intimate enough for him to tell you THAT he must, have told you more—told you something to justify his behaviour. He couldn't—even Peter Van Degen couldn't—just simply have said to you: 'I wont see her.'"
Mrs. Rolliver hesitated, visibly troubled to the point of regretting her intervention.
"He DID say more?" Undine insisted. "He gave you a reason?
"He said you'd know."
"Oh how base—how base!" Undine was trembling with one of her little-girl rages, the storms of destructive fury before which Mr. and Mrs. Spragg had cowered when she was a charming golden-curled cherub. But life had administered some of the discipline which her parents had spared her, and she pulled herself together with a gasp of pain. "Of course he's been turned against me. His wife has the whole of New York behind her, and I've no one; but I know it would be all right if I could only see him."
Her friend made no answer, and Undine pursued, with an irrepressible outbreak of her old vehemence: "Indiana Rolliver, if you won't do it for me I'll go straight off to his hotel this very minute. I'll wait there in the hall till he sees me!"