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 eye-lids 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 could he be but young Peter Van
Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of
Ralph Marvell's cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of
Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of
winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short,
of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable
outside the magic ring of the Society Column? Undine smiled as she
recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on
her--it almost consoled her for his wife's indifference!

W