aware of a subtle
change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had
set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads
twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers
dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background.
Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her
opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being
able to name them--fixed figure-heads of the social prow--others she
recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom
she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she
pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless.

Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized
her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not
use it! What on earth could the people be doing--what rarer delight
could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes
and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme,
and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays
and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty
because Mrs. Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! "PETER WILL
BE AT ONE OF HIS DINNERS." Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen
dining-room--she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding
--with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and
Ralph Marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to
take a light from his hostess's cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes
on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction,
and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the
glitter of jewels on Mrs. Van Degen's bare shoulders to the way young
Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened.

Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had
been "taken" by her--that she could ever really count among these happy
self-absorbed people! They all had their friends, their ties, their
delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an
intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated?

As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen
dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was
horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a
poisoned atmosphere.