passages with Claud Walsingham Popple, and her quieter but more fruitful
talk with his little friend--the young man she had hardly noticed.

"You can go, Celeste--I'll take off the dress myself," she said: and
when Celeste had passed out, laden with discarded finery. Undine bolted
her door, dragged the tall pier-glass forward and, rummaging in a drawer
for fan and gloves, swept to a seat before the mirror with the air of a
lady arriving at an evening party. Celeste, before leaving, had drawn
down the blinds and turned on the electric light, and the white and gold
room, with its blazing wall-brackets, formed a sufficiently brilliant
background to carry out the illusion. So untempered a glare would have
been destructive to all half-tones and subtleties of modelling; but
Undine's beauty was as vivid, and almost as crude, as the brightness
suffusing it. Her black brows, her reddish-tawny hair and the pure red
and white of her complexion defied the searching decomposing radiance:
she might have been some fabled creature whose home was in a beam of
light.

Undine, as a child, had taken but a lukewarm interest in the diversions
of her playmates. Even in the early days when she had lived with her
parents in a ragged outskirt of Apex, and hung on the fence with Indiana
Frusk, the freckled daughter of the plumber "across the way," she had
cared little for dolls or skipping-ropes, and still less for the riotous
games in which the loud Indiana played Atalanta to all the boyhood of
the quarter. Already Undine's chief delight was to "dress up" in her
mother's Sunday skirt and "play lady" before the wardrobe mirror. The
taste had outlasted childhood, and she still practised the same secret
pantomime, gliding in, settling her skirts, swaying her fan, moving her
lips in soundless talk and laughter; but lately she had shrunk from
everything that reminded her of her baffled social yearnings. Now,