te, and his mother and sister, reluctant as they
were to interfere, felt they ought to urge Undine to come back to him.
Details followed, unwelcome and officious. What right had Laura Fairford
to preach to her of wifely obligations? No doubt Charles Bowen had sent
home a highly-coloured report--and there was really a certain irony in
Mrs. Fairford's criticizing her sister-in-law's conduct on information
obtained from such a source! Undine turned from the window and threw
herself down on her deeply cushioned sofa. She was feeling the pleasant
fatigue consequent on her trip to the country, whither she and Mrs.
Shallum had gone with Raymond de Chelles to spend a night at the old
Marquis's chateau. When her travelling companions, an hour earlier, had
left her at her door, she had half-promised to rejoin them for a late
dinner in the Bois; and as she leaned back among the cushions disturbing
thoughts were banished by the urgent necessity of deciding what dress
she should wear.

These bright weeks of the Parisian spring had given her a first real
glimpse into the art of living. From the experts who had taught her to
subdue the curves of her figure and soften her bright free stare with
dusky pencillings, to the skilled purveyors of countless forms of
pleasure--the theatres and restaurants, the green and blossoming
suburbs, the whole shining shifting spectacle of nights and days--every
sight and sound and word had combined to charm her perceptions and
refine her taste. And her growing friendship with Raymond de Chelles had
been the most potent of these influences.

Chelles, at once immensely "taken," had not only shown his eagerness to
share in the helter-skelter motions of Undine's party, but had given her
glimpses of another, still more brilliant existence, that life of the
inaccessible "Faubourg" of which the first tantalizing hints had but
lately reached her. Hitherto she had assumed that Paris existed for the
stranger, that its native life was merely an obscure foundation for
the dazzling superstructure of hotels and restaurants in which her
compatriots disported themselves. But lately she had begun to hear
about other American women, the women who had married into the French
aristocracy, and who led, in the high-walled houses beyond the Seine
which she had once thought so dull and dingy, a life that made her own
seem as undistinguished as the social existence of the Mealey
House. Perhaps what most exasperated her was the