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?"
"Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he'd asked for me." Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself—it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation.
Undine shrugged her shoulders. "It was a mistake, of course. Why on earth did you let him come up?"