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understanding that her presence was no longer wanted. But on the threshold she paused, as if overruled by a stronger influence, and said, with a last look at her daughter: ‘You didn’t meet anybody when you were out, did you, Undie?’
    Undine’s brows drew together: she was struggling with her long patent-leather boot.
    ‘Meet anybody? Do you mean anybody I know? I don’t
know
anybody – I never shall, if father can’t afford to let me go round with people!’
    The boot was off with a wrench, and she flung it violently across the old-rose carpet, while Mrs Spragg, turning away to hide a look of inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room.
    The day wore on. Undine had meant to go down and tell Mabel Lipscomb about the Fairford dinner, but its after-taste was flat on her lips. What could it lead to? Nothing, as far as she could see. Ralph Marvell had not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess to Mabel that he had not driven home with her.
    Suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which Mrs Fairford had spoken. Perhaps she might meet some of the people she had seen at dinner – from their talk one might have imagined that they spent their lives in picture-galleries.
    The thought reanimated her, and she put on her handsomest furs, and a hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undine knew none of the ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choicer fare.
    When she reached the art gallery which Mrs Fairford had named she found it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue; and some of the ladies and gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the ‘look’ which signified social consecration. As Undine made her way among them, she was aware of attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables, while ripples of self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back.
    Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand.
    As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eyelids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie …
    ‘Oh, thank you,’ she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat in hand, saying sociably: ‘The crowd’s simply awful, isn’t it?’
    At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a tap of her wand, and a careless ‘Peter, look at this,’ swept him to the other side of the gallery.
    Undine’s heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had identified him. Peter Van Degen – who