?" she
faltered.

He slipped his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. "No--I guess Elmer and
I are pretty well talked out."

Mrs. Spragg took up her moan. "Don't you tell her you saw him, Abner."

"I'll do as you say; but she may meet him herself."

"Oh, I guess not--not in this new set she's going with! Don't tell her
ANYHOW."

He turned away, feeling for one of the cigars which he always carried
loose in his pocket; and his wife, rising, stole after him, and laid her
hand on his arm.

"He can't do anything to her, can he?"

"Do anything to her?" He swung about furiously. "I'd like to see him
touch her--that's all!"

II

Undine's white and gold bedroom, with sea-green panels and old rose
carpet, looked along Seventy-second Street toward the leafless tree-tops
of the Central Park.

She went to the window, and drawing back its many layers of lace gazed
eastward down the long brownstone perspective. Beyond the Park lay Fifth
Avenue--and Fifth Avenue was where she wanted to be!

She turned back into the room, and going to her writing-table laid Mrs.
Fairford's note before her, and began to study it minutely. She had read
in the "Boudoir Chat" of one of the Sunday papers that the smartest
women were using the new pigeon-blood notepaper with white ink; and
rather against her mother's advice she had ordered a large supply, with
her monogram in silver. It was a disappointment, therefore, to find that
Mrs. Fairford wrote on the old-fashioned white sheet, without even a
monogram--simply her address and telephone number. It gave Undine rather
a poor opinion of Mrs. Fairford's social standing, and for a moment she
thought with considerable satisfaction of answering the note on
her pigeon-blood paper. Then she remembered Mrs. Heeny's emphatic
commendation of Mrs. Fairford, and her pen wavered. What if white paper
were really newer than pigeon blood? It might be more stylish, anyhow.
Well, she didn't care if Mrs. Fairford didn't like red paper--SHE did!
And she wasn't going to truckle to any woman who lived in a small house
down beyond Park Avenue...

Undine was fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative. She
wanted to surprise every one by her dash and originality, but she could
not help modelling herself on the last person she met, and the confusion
of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation when she had to
choose between two courses. She hesitated a moment longer, and then took
from the drawe