She was still brooding over this last
failure when one afternoon, as she loitered on the
hotel terrace, she was approached by a young woman
whom she had seen sitting near the wheeled chair of
an old lady wearing a crumpled black bonnet under
a funny fringed parasol with a jointed handle.
The young woman, who was small, slight
and brown, was dressed with a disregard of the fashion
which contrasted oddly with the mauve powder on her
face and the traces of artificial colour in her dark
untidy hair. She looked as if she might have
several different personalities, and as if the one
of the moment had been hanging up a long time in her
wardrobe and been hurriedly taken down as probably
good enough for the present occasion.
With her hands in her jacket pockets,
and an agreeable smile on her boyish face, she strolled
up to Undine and asked, in a pretty variety of Parisian
English, if she had the pleasure of speaking to Mrs.
Marvell.
On Undine’s assenting, the smile
grew more alert and the lady continued: “I
think you know my friend Sacha Adelschein?”
No question could have been less welcome
to Undine. If there was one point on which she
was doggedly and puritanically resolved, it was that
no extremes of social adversity should ever again draw
her into the group of people among whom Madame Adelschein
too conspicuously figured. Since her unsuccessful
attempt to win over Indiana by introducing her to
that group, Undine had been righteously resolved to
remain aloof from it; and she was drawing herself
up to her loftiest height of disapproval when the
stranger, as if unconscious of it, went on: “Sacha
speaks of you so often she admires you
so much. I think you know also my cousin
Chelles,” she added, looking into Undine’s
eyes. “I am the Princess Estradina.
I’ve come here with my mother for the air.”
The murmur of negation died on Undine’s
lips. She found herself grappling with a new
social riddle, and such surprises were always stimulating.
The name of the untidy-looking young woman she had
been about to repel was one of the most eminent in
the impregnable quarter beyond the Seine. No
one figured more largely in the Parisian chronicle
than the Princess Estradina, and no name more impressively
headed the list at every marriage, funeral and philanthropic
entertainment of the Faubourg Saint Germain than that
of her mother, the Duchesse de Dordogne,
who must be no other than the old woman sitting in
the Bath-chair with the crumpled bonnet and the ridiculous
sunshade.
But it was not the appearance of the
two ladies that surprised Undine. She knew that
social gold does not always glitter, and that the lady
she had heard spoken of as Lili Estradina was notoriously
careless of the conventions; but that she should boast
of her intimacy with Madame Adelschein, and use it
as a pretext for naming herself, overthrew all Undine’s
hierarchies.
“Yes it’s hideously
dull here, and I’m dying of it. Do come
over and speak to my mother. She’s dying
of it too; but don’t tell her so, because she
hasn’t found it out. There were so many
things our mothers never found out,” the Princess
rambled on, with her half-mocking half-intimate smile;
and in another moment Undine, thrilled at having Mrs.
Spragg thus coupled with a Duchess, found herself seated
between mother and daughter, and responding by a radiant
blush to the elder lady’s amiable opening:
“You know my nephew Raymond he’s
your great admirer.”
How had it happened, whither would
it lead, how long could it last? The questions
raced through Undine’s brain as she sat listening
to her new friends they seemed already
too friendly to be called acquaintances! replying
to their enquiries, and trying to think far enough
ahead to guess what they would expect her to say, and
what tone it would be well to take. She was used
to such feats of mental agility, and it was instinctive
with her to become, for the moment, the person she
thought her interlocutors expected her to be; but she
had never had quite so new a part to play at such
short notice. She took her cue, however, from
the fact that the Princess Estradina, in her mother’s
presence, made no farther allusion to her dear friend
Sacha, and seemed somehow, though she continued to
chat on in the same easy strain, to look differently
and throw out different implications. All these
shades of demeanour were immediately perceptible to
Undine, who tried to adapt herself to them by combining
in her manner a mixture of Apex dash and New York
dignity; and the result was so successful that when
she rose to go the Princess, with a hand on her arm,
said almost wistfully: “You’re staying
on too? Then do take pity on us! We might
go on some trips together; and in the evenings we
could make a bridge.”
A new life began for Undine.
The Princess, chained her mother’s side, and
frankly restive under her filial duty, clung to her
new acquaintance with a persistence too flattering
to be analyzed. “My dear, I was on the
brink of suicide when I saw your name in the visitors’
list,” she explained; and Undine felt like answering
that she had nearly reached the same pass when the
Princess’s thin little hand had been held out
to her. For the moment she was dizzy with the
effect of that random gesture. Here she was,
at the lowest ebb of her fortunes, miraculously rehabilitated,
reinstated, 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 cachottière,
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 with her her two little
girls. She seemed extremely attached to both though
avowing for the younger a preference she frankly ascribed
to the interesting accident of its parentage and
she could not understand that Undine, as to whose
domestic difficulties she minutely informed herself,
should have consented to leave her child to strangers.
“For, to one’s child every one but one’s
self is a stranger; and whatever your égarements ”
she began, breaking off with a stare when Undine interrupted
her to explain that the courts had ascribed all the
wrongs in the case to her husband. “But
then but then ” murmured
the Princess, turning away from the subject as if
checked by too deep an abyss of difference.
The incident had embarrassed Undine,
and though she tried to justify herself by allusions
to her boy’s dependence on his father’s
family, and to the duty of not standing in his way,
she saw that she made no impression. “Whatever
one’s errors, one’s child belongs to one,”
her hearer continued to repeat; and Undine, who was
frequently scandalized by the Princess’s conversation,
now found herself in the odd position of having to
set a watch upon her own in order not to scandalize
the Princess.
Each day, nevertheless, strengthened
her hold on her new friends. After her first
flush of triumph she began indeed to suspect that she
had been a slight disappointment to the Princess,
had not completely justified the hopes raised by the
doubtful honour of being one of Sacha Adelschein’s
intimates. Undine guessed that the Princess had
expected to find her more amusing, “queerer,”
more startling in speech and conduct. Though
by instinct she was none of these things, she was eager
to go as far as was expected; but she felt that her
audacities were on lines too normal to be interesting,
and that the Princess thought her rather school-girlish
and old-fashioned. Still, they had in common their
youth, their boredom, their high spirits and their
hunger for amusement; and Undine was making the most
of these ties when one day, coming back from a trip
to Monte-Carlo with the Princess, she was brought up
short by the sight of a lady evidently
a new arrival who was seated in an attitude
of respectful intimacy beside the old Duchess’s
chair. Undine, advancing unheard over the fine
gravel of the garden path, recognized at a glance
the Marquise de Trezac’s drooping nose and disdainful
back, and at the same moment heard her say: “ And
her husband?”
“Her husband? But she’s
an American she’s divorced,”
the Duchess replied, as if she were merely stating
the same fact in two different ways; and Undine stopped
short with a pang of apprehension.
The Princess came up behind her.
“Who’s the solemn person with Mamma?
Ah, that old bore of a Trezac!” She dropped her
long eye-glass with a laugh. “Well, she’ll
be useful she’ll stick to Mamma like
a leech and we shall get away oftener. Come,
let’s go and be charming to her.”
She approached Madame de Trezac effusively,
and after an interchange of exclamations Undine heard
her say “You know my friend Mrs. Marvell?
No? How odd! Where do you manage to hide
yourself, chère Madame? Undine, here’s
a compatriot who hasn’t the pleasure ”
“I’m such a hermit, dear
Mrs. Marvell the Princess shows me what
I miss,” the Marquise de Trezac murmured, rising
to give her hand to Undine, and speaking in a voice
so different from that of the supercilious Miss Wincher
that only her facial angle and the droop of her nose
linked her to the hated vision of Potash Springs.
Undine felt herself dancing on a flood-tide
of security. For the first time the memory of
Potash Springs became a thing to smile at, and with
the Princess’s arm through hers she shone back
triumphantly on Madame de Trezac, who seemed to have
grown suddenly obsequious and insignificant, as though
the waving of the Princess’s wand had stripped
her of all her false advantages.
But upstairs, in her own room.
Undine’s courage fell. Madame de Trezac
had been civil, effusive even, because for the moment
she had been taken off her guard by finding Mrs. Marvell
on terms of intimacy with the Princess Estradina and
her mother. But the force of facts would reassert
itself. Far from continuing to see Undine through
her French friends’ eyes she would probably
invite them to view her compatriot through the searching
lens of her own ampler information. “The
old hypocrite she’ll tell them everything,”
Undine murmured, wincing at the recollection of the
dentist’s assistant from Deposit, and staring
miserably at her reflection in the dressing-table
mirror. Of what use were youth and grace and
good looks, if one drop of poison distilled from the
envy of a narrow-minded woman was enough to paralyze
them? Of course Madame de Trezac knew and remembered,
and, secure in her own impregnable position, would
never rest till she had driven out the intruder.