Chapter 3

Though she would not for the world have owned it to her parents, Undine
was disappointed in the Fairford dinner.

The house, to begin with, was small and rather shabby. There was no
gilding, no lavish diffusion of light: the room they sat in after
dinner, with its green-shaded lamps making faint pools of brightness,
and its rows of books from floor to ceiling, reminded Undine of the old
circulating library at Apex, before the new marble building was put up.
Then, instead of a gas-log, or a polished grate with electric bulbs
behind ruby glass, there was an old-fashioned wood-fire, like pictures
of "Back to the farm for Christmas"; and when the logs fell forward Mrs.
Pairford or her brother had to jump up to push them in place, and the
ashes scattered over the hearth untidily.

The dinner too was disappointing. Undine was too young to take note of
culinary details, but she had expected to view the company through a
bower of orchids and eat pretty-coloured entrees in ruffled papers.
Instead, there was only a low centre-dish of ferns, and plain roasted
and broiled meat that one could recognize--as if they'd been dyspeptics
on a diet! With all the hints in the Sunday papers, she thought it dull
of Mrs. Fairford not to have picked up something newer; and as the
evening progressed she began to suspect that it wasn't a real "dinner
party," and that they had just asked her in to share what they had when
they were alone.

But a glance about the table convinced her that Mrs. Fairford could not
have meant to treat her other guests so lightly. They were only eight
in number, but one was no less a person than young Mrs. Peter Van
Degen--the one who had been a Dagonet--and the consideration which this
young lady, herself one of the choicest ornaments of the Society Column,
displayed toward the rest of the company, convinced Undine that they
must be more important than they looked. She liked Mrs. Fairford,
a small incisive woman, with a big nose and good teeth revealed by
frequent smiles. In her dowdy black and antiquated ornaments she was not
what Undine would have called "stylish"; but she had a droll kind way
which reminded the girl of her father's manner when he was not tired or
worried about money. One of the other ladies, having white hair, did not
long arrest Undine's attention; and the fourth, a girl like herself, who
was introduced as Miss Harriet Ray, she dismissed at a glance as plain
and wearing a last year's "model."

The men, too, were less striking than she had hoped. She had not
expected much of Mr. Fairford, since married men were intrinsically
uninteresting, and his baldness and grey moustache seemed naturally to
relegate him to the background; but she