on a glaring lake.

There Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to
Indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own
against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the
acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining
engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the
newly developed Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her
repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the
general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation
to Undine. There was something still better beyond, then--more
luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! She once said to herself,
afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about
the "something beyond." But in this case it was not too late--and
obstinately, inflexibly, she set herself to the task of forcing her
parents to take her "east" the next summer.

Yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a
Virginia "resort," where Undine had her first glimpse of more romantic
possibilities--leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain
glades, and an atmosphere of Christmas-chromo sentimentality that
tempered her hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more
delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled by a
peep through another door. Undine, after a first mustering of the other
girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first--till the
arrival, from Washington, of Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and their daughter.
Undine was much handsomer than Miss Wincher, but she saw at a glance
that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her
plainness. She was exasperated too, by the discovery that Miss Wincher
seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but
actually unaware of her existence. Listless, long-faced, supercilious,
the young lady from Washington sat apart reading novels or playing
solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel's loud life of
gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. Undine never
even succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book
when the Apex beauty trailed or rattled past her secluded corner. But
one day an acquaintance of the Winchers' turned up--a lady from Boston,
who had come to Virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of Miss
Wincher's conversation with the newcomer, Und