“Ah?  A broker?” He said it almost as Popple might have said “A dentist?” and Undine found herself astray in a new labyrinth of social distinctions.  She felt a sudden contempt for Harry Lipscomb, who had already struck her as too loud, and irrelevantly comic.  “I guess Mabel’ll get a divorce pretty soon,” she added, desiring, for personal reasons, to present Mrs. Lipscomb as favourably as possible.

Mr. Dagonet’s handsome eye-brows drew together.  “A divorce?  H’m—­that’s bad.  Has he been misbehaving himself?”

Undine looked innocently surprised.  “Oh, I guess not.  They like each other well enough.  But he’s been a disappointment to her.  He isn’t in the right set, and I think Mabel realizes she’ll never really get anywhere till she gets rid of him.”

These words, uttered in the high fluting tone that she rose to when sure of her subject, fell on a pause which prolonged and deepened itself to receive them, while every face at the table, Ralph Marvell’s excepted, reflected in varying degree Mr. Dagonet’s pained astonishment.

“But, my dear young lady—­what would your friend’s situation be if, as you put it, she ‘got rid’ of her husband on so trivial a pretext?”

Undine, surprised at his dullness, tried to explain.  “Oh that wouldn’t be the reason given, of course.  Any lawyer could fix it up for them.  Don’t they generally call it desertion?”

There was another, more palpitating, silence, broken by a laugh from Ralph.

“Ralph!” his mother breathed; then, turning to Undine, she said with a constrained smile:  “I believe in certain parts of the country such—­unfortunate arrangements—­are beginning to be tolerated.  But in New York, in spite of our growing indifference, a divorced woman is still—­thank heaven!—­at a decided disadvantage.”

Undine’s eyes opened wide.  Here at last was a topic that really interested her, and one that gave another amazing glimpse into the camera obscura of New York society.  “Do you mean to say Mabel would be worse off, then?  Couldn’t she even go round as much as she does now?”

Mrs. Marvell met this gravely.  “It would depend, I should say, on the kind of people she wished to see.”

“Oh, the very best, of course!  That would be her only object.”

Ralph interposed with another laugh.  “You see, Undine, you’d better think twice before you divorce me!”

“Ralph!” his mother again breathed; but the girl, flushed and sparkling, flung back:  “Oh, it all depends on you!  Out in Apex, if a girl marries a man who don’t come up to what she expected, people consider it’s to her credit to want to change.  You’d better think twice of that!”

“If I were only sure of knowing what you expect!” he caught up her joke, tossing it back at her across the fascinated silence of their listeners.

“Why, everything!” she announced—­and Mr. Dagonet, turning, laid an intricately-veined old hand on, hers, and said, with a change of tone that relaxed the tension of the listeners:  “My child, if you look like that you’ll get it.”