Chapter 1 - Page 2

her mother's lap.

"Why--isn't it from Mr. Popple?" Mrs. Spragg exclaimed unguardedly.

"No--it isn't. What made you think I thought it was?" snapped her
daughter; but the next instant she added, with an outbreak of childish
disappointment: "It's only from Mr. Marvell's sister--at least she says
she's his sister."

Mrs. Spragg, with a puzzled frown, groped for her eye-glass among the
jet fringes of her tightly-girded front.

Mrs. Heeny's small blue eyes shot out sparks of curiosity.
"Marvell--what Marvell is that?"

The girl explained languidly: "A little fellow--I think Mr. Popple said
his name was Ralph"; while her mother continued: "Undine met them both
last night at that party downstairs. And from something Mr. Popple said
to her about going to one of the new plays, she thought--"

"How on earth do you know what I thought?" Undine flashed back, her grey
eyes darting warnings at her mother under their straight black brows.

"Why, you SAID you thought--" Mrs. Spragg began reproachfully; but Mrs.
Heeny, heedless of their bickerings, was pursuing her own train of
thought.

"What Popple? Claud Walsingham Popple--the portrait painter?"

"Yes--I suppose so. He said he'd like to paint me. Mabel Lipscomb
introduced him. I don't care if I never see him again," the girl said,
bathed in angry pink.

"Do you know him, Mrs. Heeny?" Mrs. Spragg enquired.

"I should say I did. I manicured him for his first society portrait--a
full-length of Mrs. Harmon B. Driscoll." Mrs. Heeny smiled indulgently
on her hearers. "I know everybody. If they don't know ME they ain't in
it, and Claud Walsingham Popple's in it. But he ain't nearly AS in it,"
she continued judicially, "as Ralph Marvell--the little fellow, as you
call him."

Undine Spragg, at the word, swept round on the speaker with one of the
quick turns that revealed her youthful flexibility. She was always
doubling and twisting on herself, and every movement she made seemed
to start at the nape of her neck, just below the lifted roll of
reddish-gold hair, and flow without a break through her whole slim
length to the tips of her fingers and the points of her slender restless
feet.

"Why, do you know the Marvells? Are THEY stylish?" she asked.

Mrs. Heeny gave the discouraged gesture of a pedagogue who has vainly
striven to implant the rudiments of knowledge in a rebellious mind.

"Why, Undine Spragg, I've told you all about them time and again!
His mother was a Dagonet. They live with old Urban Dagonet down in
Washington Square."

To Mrs.