Chapter 27

She was still brooding over this last failure when one afternoon, as she
loitered on the hotel terrace, she was approached by a young woman whom
she had seen sitting near the wheeled chair of an old lady wearing a
crumpled black bonnet under a funny fringed parasol with a jointed
handle.

The young woman, who was small, slight and brown, was dressed with a
disregard of the fashion which contrasted oddly with the mauve powder on
her face and the traces of artificial colour in her dark untidy hair.
She looked as if she might have several different personalities, and as
if the one of the moment had been hanging up a long time in her wardrobe
and been hurriedly taken down as probably good enough for the present
occasion.

With her hands in her jacket pockets, and an agreeable smile on her
boyish face, she strolled up to Undine and asked, in a pretty variety of
Parisian English, if she had the pleasure of speaking to Mrs. Marvell.

On Undine's assenting, the smile grew more alert and the lady continued:
"I think you know my friend Sacha Adelschein?"

No question could have been less welcome to Undine. If there was one
point on which she was doggedly and puritanically resolved, it was that
no extremes of social adversity should ever again draw her into the
group of people among whom Madame Adelschein too conspicuously figured.
Since her unsuccessful attempt to win over Indiana by introducing her to
that group, Undine had been righteously resolved to remain aloof from
it; and she was drawing herself up to her loftiest height of disapproval
when the stranger, as if unconscious of it, went on: "Sacha speaks of
you so often--she admires you so much.--I think you know also my cousin
Chelles," she added, looking into Undine's eyes. "I am the Princess
Estradina. I've come here with my mother for the air."

The murmur of negation died on Undine's lips. She found herself
grappling with a new social riddle, and such surprises were always
stimulating. The name of the untidy-looking young woman she had been
about to repel was one of the most eminent in the impregnable quarter
beyond the Seine. No one figured more largely in the Parisian chronicle
than the Princess Estradina, and no name more impressively headed the
list at every marriage, funeral and philanthropic entertainment of
the Faubourg Saint Germain than that of her mother, the Duchesse de
Dordogne, who must be no other than the old woman sitting in the
Bath-chair with the crumpled bonnet and the ridiculous sunshade.

But it was not the appearance of the two ladies that surprised Undine.
She knew that social gold does not always glitter, and that the lady she
had heard spoken of as Lili Estradina was notoriously