I feel for you tremendously—that’s the reason why I’m talking so frankly. You must be horribly depressed. Come and dine tonight—or no, if you don’t mind I’d rather you chose another evening. I’d forgotten that I’d asked the Jim Driscolls, and it might be uncomfortable—for YOU….”
In another world she was still welcome, at first perhaps even more so than before: the world, namely, to which she had proposed to present Indiana Rolliver. Roviano, Madame Adelschein, and a few of the freer spirits of her old St. Moritz band, reappearing in Paris with the close of the watering-place season, had quickly discovered her and shown a keen interest in her liberation. It appeared in some mysterious way to make her more available for their purpose, and she found that, in the character of the last American divorcee, she was even regarded as eligible to the small and intimate inner circle of their loosely-knit association. At first she could not make out what had entitled her to this privilege, and increasing enlightenment produced a revolt of the Apex puritanism which, despite some odd accommodations and compliances, still carried its head so high in her.
Undine had been perfectly sincere in telling Indiana Rolliver that she was not “an Immoral woman.” The pleasures for which her sex took such risks had never attracted her, and she did not even crave the excitement of having it thought that they did. She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability; and despite her surface-sophistication her notion of amusement was hardly less innocent than when she had hung on the plumber’s fence with Indiana Frusk. It gave her, therefore, no satisfaction to find herself included among Madame Adelschein’s intimates. It embarrassed her to feel that she was expected to be “queer” and “different,” to respond to passwords and talk in innuendo, to associate with the equivocal and the subterranean and affect to despise the ingenuous daylight joys which really satisfied her soul. But the business shrewdness which was never quite dormant in her suggested that this was not the moment for such scruples. She must make the best of what she could get and wait her chance of getting something better; and meanwhile the most practical use to which she could put her shady friends was to flash their authentic nobility in the dazzled eyes of Mrs. Rolliver.
With this object in view she made haste, in a fashionable tea-room of the rue de Rivoli, to group about Indiana the most titled members of the band; and the felicity of the occasion would have been unmarred had she not suddenly caught sight of Raymond de Chelles sitting on the other side of the room.
She had not seen Chelles since her return to Paris. It had seemed preferable to leave their meeting to chance and the present chance might have served as well as another but for the fact that among his companions were two or three of the most eminent ladies of the proud quarter beyond the Seine. It was what Undine, in moments of discouragement, characterized as “her luck” that one of these should be the hated Miss Wincher of Potash Springs, who had now become the Marquise de Trezac. Undine knew that Chelles and his compatriots, however scandalized at her European companions, would be completely indifferent to Mrs. Rolliver’s appearance; but one gesture of Madame de Trezac’s eyeglass would wave Indiana to her place and thus brand the whole party as “wrong.”
All this passed through Undine’s mind in the very moment of her noting the change of expression with which Chelles had signalled his recognition. If their encounter could have occurred in happier conditions it might have had far-reaching results. As it was, the crowded state of the tea-room, and the distance between their tables, sufficiently excused his restricting his greeting to an eager bow; and Undine went home heavy-hearted from this first attempt to reconstruct her past.
Her spirits were not lightened by the developments of the next few days. She kept herself well in the foreground of Indiana’s life, and cultivated toward the rarely-visible Rolliver a manner in which impersonal admiration for the statesman was tempered with the politest indifference to the man. Indiana seemed to do justice to her efforts and to be reassured by the result; but still there came no hint of a reward. For a time Undine restrained the question on her lips; but one afternoon, when she had inducted Indiana into the deepest mysteries of Parisian complexion-making, the importance of the service and the confidential mood it engendered seemed to warrant a discreet allusion to their bargain.
Indiana leaned back among her cushions with an embarrassed laugh.
“Oh, my dear, I’ve been meaning to tell you—it’s off, I’m afraid. The dinner is, I mean. You see, Mr. Van Degen has seen you ‘round with me, and the very minute I asked him to come and dine he guessed—”
“He guessed—and he wouldn’t?”
“Well, no. He wouldn’t. I hate to tell you.”
“Oh—” Undine threw off a vague laugh. “Since you’re intimate enough for him to tell you THAT he must, have told you more—told you something to justify his behaviour. He couldn’t—even Peter Van Degen couldn’t—just simply have said to you: ‘I wont see her.’”
Mrs. Rolliver hesitated, visibly troubled to the point of regretting her intervention.
“He DID say more?” Undine insisted. “He gave you a reason?
“He said you’d know.”
“Oh how base—how base!” Undine was trembling with one of her littlegirl rages, the storms of destructive fury before which Mr. and Mrs. Spragg had cowered when she was a charming golden-curled cherub. But life had administered some of the discipline which her parents had spared her, and she pulled herself together with a gasp of pain. “Of course he’s been turned against me. His wife has the whole of New York behind her, and I’ve no one; but I know it would be all right if I could only see him.”
Her friend made no answer, and Undine pursued, with an irrepressible outbreak of her old vehemence: “Indiana Rolliver, if you won’t do it for me I’ll go straight off to his hotel this very minute. I’ll wait there in the hall till he sees me!”
Indiana lifted a protesting hand. “Don’t, Undine—not that!”
“Why not?”
“Well—I wouldn’t, that’s all.”
“You wouldn’t? Why wouldn’t you? You must have a reason.” Undine faced her with levelled brows. “Without a reason you can’t have changed so utterly since our last talk. You were positive enough then that I had a right to make him see me.”
Somewhat to her surprise, Indiana made no effort to elude the challenge. “Yes, I did think so then. But I know now that it wouldn’t do you the least bit of good.”
“Have they turned him so completely against me? I don’t care if they have! I know him—I can get him back.”
“That’s the trouble.” Indiana shed on her a gaze of cold compassion. “It’s not that any one has turned him against you. It’s worse than that—”
“What can be?”
“You’ll hate me if I tell you.”
“Then you’d better make him tell me himself!”
“I can’t. I tried to. The trouble is that it was YOU—something you did, I mean. Something he found out about you—”
Undine, to restrain a spring of anger, had to clutch both arms of her chair. “About me? How fearfully false! Why, I’ve never even LOOKED at anybody—!”
“It’s nothing of that kind.” Indiana’s mournful head-shake seemed to deplore, in Undine, an
