doing me," Mrs. Peter Van Degen was saying, in her slightly
drawling voice. "He's doing everybody this year, you know--"

"As if that were a reason!" Undine heard Mrs. Fairford breathe to Mr.
Bowen; who replied, at the same pitch: "It's a Van Degen reason, isn't
it?"--to which Mrs. Fairford shrugged assentingly.

"That delightful Popple--he paints so exactly as he talks!" the
white-haired lady took it up. "All his portraits seem to proclaim what
a gentleman he is, and how he fascinates women! They're not pictures of
Mrs. or Miss So-and-so, but simply of the impression Popple thinks he's
made on them."

Mrs. Fairford smiled. "I've sometimes thought," she mused, "that Mr.
Popple must be the only gentleman I know; at least he's the only man
who has ever told me he was a gentleman--and Mr. Popple never fails to
mention it."

Undine's ear was too well attuned to the national note of irony for her
not to perceive that her companions were making sport of the painter.
She winced at their banter as if it had been at her own expense, yet
it gave her a dizzy sense of being at last in the very stronghold of
fashion. Her attention was diverted by hearing Mrs. Van Degen, under
cover of the general laugh, say in a low tone to young Marvell: "I
thought you liked his things, or I wouldn't have had him paint me."

Something in her tone made all Undine's perceptions bristle, and she
strained her ears for the answer.

"I think he'll do you capitally--you must let me come and see some day
soon." Marvell's tone was always so light, so unemphasized, that she
could not be sure of its being as indifferent as it sounded. She looked
down at the fruit on her plate and shot a side-glance through her lashes
at Mrs. Peter Van Degen.

Mrs. Van Degen was neither beautiful nor imposing: just a dark
girlish-looking creature with plaintive eyes and a fidgety frequent
laugh. But she was more elaborately dressed and jewelled than the other
ladies, and her elegance and her restlessness made her seem less alien
to Undine. She had turned on Marvell a gaze at once pleading and
possessive; but whether betokening merely an inherited intimacy (Undine
had noticed that they were all more or less cousins) or a more personal
feeling, her observer was unable to decide; just as the tone of
the young man's reply might have expressed the open avowal of
good-fellowship or the disguise of a different sentiment. All was
blurred and puzzling to the girl in this world