ine felt
the uselessness of struggling against such mysterious inhibitions. He
reminded her, however, that their inability to receive would give them
all the more opportunity for going out, and he showed himself more
socially disposed than in the past. But his concession did not result as
she had hoped. They were asked out as much as ever, but they were asked
to big dinners, to impersonal crushes, to the kind of entertainment it
is a slight to be omitted from but no compliment to be included in.
Nothing could have been more galling to Undine, and she frankly bewailed
the fact to Madame de Trezac.

"Of course it's what was sure to come of being mewed up for months and
months in the country. We're out of everything, and the people who are
having a good time are simply too busy to remember us. We're only asked
to the things that are made up from visiting-lists."

Madame de Trezac listened sympathetically, but did not suppress a candid
answer.

"It's not altogether that, my dear; Raymond's not a man his friends
forget. It's rather more, if you'll excuse my saying so, the fact of
your being--you personally--in the wrong set."

"The wrong set? Why, I'm in HIS set--the one that thinks itself too good
for all the others. That's what you've always told me when I've said it
bored me."

"Well, that's what I mean--" Madame de Trezac took the plunge. "It's not
a question of your being bored."

Undine coloured; but she could take the hardest thrusts where her
personal interest was involved. "You mean that I'M the bore, then?"

"Well, you don't work hard enough--you don't keep up. It's not that they
don't admire you--your looks, I mean; they think you beautiful; they're
delighted to bring you out at their big dinners, with the Sevres and the
plate. But a woman has got to be something more than good-looking to
have a chance to be intimate with them: she's got to know what's being
said about things. I watched you the other night at the Duchess's, and
half the time you hadn't an idea what they were talking about. I haven't
always, either; but then I have to put up with the big dinners."

Undine winced under the criticism; but she had never lacked insight into
the cause of her own failures, and she had already had premonitions of
what Madame de Trezac so bluntly phrased. When Raymond ceased to be
interested in her conversation she had concluded it was the way of
husbands; but since then it had been slowly dawning on her that she