hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It
was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undine knew none of the
ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to
content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake
along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and
her vanity craved a choicer fare.

When she reached the art gallery which Mrs. Fairford had named she found
it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue; and some of the ladies and
gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the "look" which signified
social consecration. As Undine made her way among them, she was aware of
attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself
into rapt attitudes before the canvases, 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