“Well, that kind of dress might come in mighty
handy on some occasions; so I guess you’d
better hold on to it for future use, and go and select
another for this Fairford dinner,” he said; and
before he could finish he was in her arms again, and
she was smothering his last word in little cries and
kisses.
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.”
