nce when it seemed easy to win any sympathy she chose
to seek.

For the only other guests--Mrs. Fairford's husband, and the elderly
Charles Bowen who seemed to be her special friend--Undine had no
attention to spare: they remained on a plane with the dim pictures
hanging at her back. She had expected a larger party; but she was
relieved, on the whole, that it was small enough to permit of her
dominating it. Not that she wished to do so by any loudness of
assertion. Her quickness in noting external differences had already
taught her to modulate and lower her voice, and to replace "The I-dea!"
and "I wouldn't wonder" by more polished locutions; and she had not been
ten minutes at table before she found that to seem very much in love,
and a little confused and subdued by the newness and intensity of the
sentiment, was, to the Dagonet mind, the becoming attitude for a young
lady in her situation. The part was not hard to play, for she WAS in
love, of course. It was pleasant, when she looked across the table, to
meet Ralph's grey eyes, with that new look in them, and to feel that she
had kindled it; but I it was only part of her larger pleasure in
the general homage to her beauty, in the sensations of interest and
curiosity excited by everything about her, from the family portraits
overhead to the old Dagonet silver on the table--which were to be hers
too, after all!

The talk, as at Mrs. Fairford's, confused her by its lack of the
personal allusion, its tendency to turn to books, pictures and politics.
"Politics," to Undine, had always been like a kind of back-kitchen to
business--the place where the refuse was thrown and the doubtful messes
were brewed. As a drawing-room topic, and one to provoke disinterested
sentiments, it had the hollowness of Fourth of July orations, and her
mind wandered in spite of the desire to appear informed and competent.

Old Mr. Dagonet, with his reedy staccato voice, that gave polish and
relief to every syllable, tried to come to her aid by questioning her
affably about her family and the friends she had made in New York.
But the caryatid-parent, who exists simply as a filial prop, is not a
fruitful theme, and Undine, called on for the first time to view her own
progenitors as a subject of conversation, was struck by their lack of
points. She had never paused to consider what her father and mother were
"interested" in, and, challenged to specify, could have named--with
sincerity--only herse