and restored to the old victorious sense of
her youth and her power! Her sole graces, her unaided personality, had
worked the miracle; how should she not trust in them hereafter?

Aside from her feeling of concrete attainment. Undine was deeply
interested in her new friends. The Princess and her mother, in their
different ways, were different from any one else she had known. The
Princess, who might have been of any age between twenty and forty, had
a small triangular face with caressing impudent eyes, a smile like a
silent whistle and the gait of a baker's boy balancing his basket. She
wore either baggy shabby clothes like a man's, or rich draperies that
looked as if they had been rained on; and she seemed equally at ease
in either style of dress, and carelessly unconscious of both. She was
extremely familiar and unblushingly inquisitive, but she never gave
Undine the time to ask her any questions or the opportunity to venture
on any freedom with her. Nevertheless she did not scruple to talk of her
sentimental experiences, and seemed surprised, and rather disappointed,
that Undine had so few to relate in return. She playfully accused her
beautiful new friend of being cachottiere, and at the sight of Undine's
blush cried out: "Ah, you funny Americans! Why do you all behave as if
love were a secret infirmity?"

The old Duchess was even more impressive, because she fitted better into
Undine's preconceived picture of the Faubourg Saint Germain, and was
more like the people with whom she pictured the former Nettie Wincher as
living in privileged intimacy. The Duchess was, indeed, more amiable
and accessible than Undine's conception of a Duchess, and displayed a
curiosity as great as her daughter's, and much more puerile, concerning
her new friend's history and habits. But through her mild prattle, and
in spite of her limited perceptions. Undine felt in her the same clear
impenetrable barrier that she ran against occasionally in the Princess;
and she was beginning to understand that this barrier represented a
number of things about which she herself had yet to learn. She would
not have known this a few years earlier, nor would she have seen in the
Duchess anything but the ruin of an ugly woman, dressed in clothes that
Mrs. Spragg wouldn't have touched. The Duchess certainly looked like a
ruin; but Undine now saw that she looked like the ruin of a castle.

The Princess, who was unofficially separated from her husband, had wi