hen 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?"

"I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie."

This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "Well, did he?" she
asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx
table.

"Why, no--he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make
out what he was after," Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own.

Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "You
never CAN," she murmured, turning away.

She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and
lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Spragg timidly
slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself
behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out
down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It
was one of