Chapter 24

"If you'd only had the sense to come straight to me, Undine Spragg!
There isn't a tip I couldn't have given you--not one!"

This speech, in which a faintly contemptuous compassion for her friend's
case was blent with the frankest pride in her own, probably represented
the nearest approach to "tact" that Mrs. James J. Rolliver had yet
acquired. Undine was impartial enough to note in it a distinct advance
on the youthful methods of Indiana Frusk; yet it required a good deal
of self-control to take the words to herself with a smile, while they
seemed to be laying a visible scarlet welt across the pale face she kept
valiantly turned to her friend. The fact that she must permit herself to
be pitied by Indiana Frusk gave her the uttermost measure of the depth
to which her fortunes had fallen. This abasement was inflicted on her
in the staring gold apartment of the Hotel Nouveau Luxe in which the
Rollivers had established themselves on their recent arrival in Paris.
The vast drawing-room, adorned only by two high-shouldered gilt baskets
of orchids drooping on their wires, reminded Undine of the "Looey suite"
in which the opening scenes of her own history had been enacted; and
the resemblance and the difference were emphasized by the fact that the
image of her past self was not inaccurately repeated in the triumphant
presence of Indiana Rolliver.

"There isn't a tip I couldn't have given you--not one!" Mrs.
Rolliver reproachfully repeated; and all Undine's superiorities and
discriminations seemed to shrivel up in the crude blaze of the other's
solid achievement.

There was little comfort in noting, for one's private delectation, that
Indiana spoke of her husband as "Mr. Rolliver," that she twanged a
piercing R, that one of her shoulders was still higher than the other,
and that her striking dress was totally unsuited to the hour, the
place and the occasion. She still did and was all that Undine had so
sedulously learned not to be and to do; but to dwell on these obstacles
to her success was but to be more deeply impressed by the fact that she
had nevertheless succeeded.

Not much more than a year had elapsed since Undine Marvell, sitting
in the drawing-room of another Parisian hotel, had heard the immense
orchestral murmur of Paris rise through the open windows like the
ascending movement of her own hopes. The immense murmur still sounded
on, deafening and implacable as some elemental force; and the discord in
her fate no more disturbed it than the motor wheels rolling by under
the windows were disturbed by the particles of dust that they ground to
finer powder as they passed.

"I could have told you one thing right off," Mrs. Rolliver