pacity of handling two thousand people through its locks every twenty minutes. A reproduction of the Grand Canyon of Arizona by the Santa Fé Railway will be another attraction. At one time it was thought of having a Roman galley manned by three hundred oarsmen as a feature, but the idea has been abandoned through doubt about securing the oarsmen!

The Panama-Pacific Exposition has the start on previous world's expositions by at least one year. The managers have learned a lesson from previous expositions and are profiting by it. The Service Building is finished and occupied. Two of the principal palaces are under contract

and are being erected at the rate of a roof truss a day. Two more are now ready for contract. From the condition of the plans of the other main buildings it would seem safe to say that all of them will be under contract not later than August of this year, and finished not later than June or July of 1914. The workmen will then turn to the erection of the minor State buildings. Trees and shrubs in the gardens will soon be planted, so that they will have had more than a year's growth at the time the Exposition opens. In California this means wonders. When people enter the gates of the Exposition in 1915, undoubtedly it will appear as finished.

XXV

NDINE MARVELL, for the next few months, tasted all the accumulated bitterness of failure.

The drifting hordes of her compatriots had scattered, after January, to the four quarters of the globe, leaving Paris to resume, under its low grey sky, its compacter winter personality. Noting, from her more and more deserted corner, each least sign of the social revival, Undine felt herself as stranded and baffled as after the ineffectual summers of her girlhood. She was not without possible alternatives; but the sense of what she had lost took the savour from all that was left. She might have attached herself to some migratory group winged for Italy or Egypt; but the prospect of travel did not in itself appeal to her, and she was doubtful of its social benefit. She lacked the adventurous curiosity which seeks its occasion in the unknown; and though she could work doggedly for a given object the obstacles to be overcome had to be as distinct to her as the prize to be gained.

Her one desire was to get back an VOL. LIV.-7

equivalent of the precise value she had lost in ceasing to be Ralph Marvell's wife. Her new visiting-card, bearing her Christian name in place of her husband's, was like the coin of a debased currency testifying to her diminished trading capacity. Her restricted means, her vacant days, all the minor irritations of her life, were as nothing compared to this sense of a lost advantage. Even in the narrowed field of a Parisian winter she might have made a place for herself in some more or less extra-social world; but her experiments in this line gave her no pleasure proportioned to the possible derogation involved. She feared to be associated with "the wrong people," and scented a shade of disrespect in every amicable advance. The more pressing attentions of one or two of the men she had formerly known filled her with a fury of outraged pride, and for the first time in her life she felt that even solitude might be preferable to certain kinds of society.

Since ill-health seemed the most plausible pretext for seclusion, it was almost a relief to find that she was really growing "nervous" and sleeping badly. The doctor she summoned advised her trying a small quiet place on the Riviera, not too

near the sea; and thither, in the early days of December, she transported herself with her maid and two omnibus-loads of trunks.

The place disconcerted her by being really small and quiet, and for a few days she had to struggle against the desire for flight. She had never before found herself in a world as colourless and negative as that of the large white hotel where everybody went to bed at nine, and donkey-rides over stony hills were the only alternative to slow drives along dusty roads. Many of the dwellers in this temple of repose found even these exercises too stimulating, and preferred to sit for hours under the palms in the garden, playing Patience, embroidering, or reading odd volumes of Tauchnitz. Undine, driven by despair to an inspection of the melancholy hotel library, discovered that scarcely any work it contained was complete; but this did not seem to trouble the readers, who continued to feed their leisure with mutilated fiction, from which they occasionally raised their eyes to glance mistrustfully at the new arrival who swept the garden gravel with her frivolous draperies. The ladies in the hotel were of divers nationalities, but their racial differences were levelled by the stamp of a common mediocrity. All differences of tongue, of custom, of physiognomy, disappeared in this deep community of insignificance, which was like some secret bond, with the manifold signs and pass-words of its ignorances and its imperceptions. It was not the heterogeneous mediocrity of the American sum mer hotel, where the lack of any standard is the nearest approach to a tie, but an organized codified dulness, in conscious possession of its rights, and strong in the voluntary ignorance of any others.

It took Undine a long time to reach an understanding of this new world, and meanwhile she fretted, fumed and flaunted, or abandoned herself to long periods of fruitless exasperation. Sometimes, during her phases of retrospection, a flame of anger shot up in her, dismally illuminating the path she had travelled and the blank wall to which it led. At other moments past and present were enveloped in a dull fog of rancour which seemed to distort and fade even the image she presented to her morning mirror. There were

days when every young face she saw left in her a taste of poison. But when she compared herself with the dowdy specimens of her sex who plied their languid industries under the palms, or looked away as she passed them in hall or staircase, her spirits rose, and she rang for her maid and dressed herself in her newest and vividest. These were unprofitable triumphs, however. She never made one of these attacks on the organized disapproval of the community without feeling she had lost ground by it; and the next day she would lie in bed in her darkened room and send down capricious orders for food, which her maid would presently remove untouched, with orders to transmit her complaints to the landlord.

In other moods the events of the past year, ceaselessly revolving through her brain, became no longer a subject for criticism or justification, but simply a series of pictures monotonously unrolled. Hour by hour, in such moods, she re-lived the incidents of her flight with Peter Van Degen: the part of her career that, since it had proved a failure, seemed most unlike herself and hardest to justify. She had gone away with him, and had lived with him for two months: she, Undine Marvell, to whom respectability was the breath of life, to whom such follies had always been unintelligible and therefore inexcusable. She had done this incredible thing, and she had done it from a motive that seemed, at the time, as clear, as logical, as free from the distorting mists of sentimentality, as any of her father's business enterprises. It had been a bold move, but it had been as carefully calculated as the most successful "stroke" in Wall Street. She had gone away with Peter because, after the decisive scene in which she had put her power to the test, to yield to him seemed the surest means of victory. Even to her practical intelligence it was clear that an immediate dash to Dakota might look too calculated; and she had preserved her self-respect by telling herself that she was really his wife, and in no way to blame if the slow processes of the law delayed to ratify the fact.

She was still convinced of the justness of her reasoning; but she now saw that it had left certain contingent risks out of account. Her life with Van Degen had

taught her many things she had not understood before. The two had wandered from place to place, spending a great deal of money, always more and more money; for the first time in her life she had been able to buy everything she wanted. For a while this had kept her amused and busy; but presently she began to perceive that her companion's view of their relation was not the same as hers. She saw that he had always meant it to be an unavowed tie, screened by Mrs. Shallum's companionship and Clare's careless tolerance; and that on those terms he would have gloried in shedding on their adventure the brightest blaze of notoriety. But since Undine had insisted on being carried off like a sentimental school-girl he meant to shroud the affair in mystery, and was as zealous in concealing their relation as she was bent on proclaiming it. In the "powerful" novels which Popple was fond of lending her she had met with increasing frequency the type of heroine who scorns to love clandestinely, and proclaims the sanctity of passion and the moral duty of obeying its call. Undine had been struck by these arguments as justifying and even ennobling her course, and had let Peter understand that she had been actuated by the highest motives in openly associating her life with his; but he had opposed a placid insensibility to these allusions, and had persisted in treating her as though their journey were the kind of escapade that a man of the world is bound to shroud in secrecy. She had expected to show herself with him in all the amusing places where couples like themselves are relieved from a too sustained contemplation of nature by the distractions of the restaurant and the gaming-table; but he had carried her from one obscure corner of Europe to another, shunning fashionable hotels and crowded watering-places, and displaying an ingenuity in the discovery of the unvisited and the out-of-season that gave their journey an odd resemblance to her melancholy wedding-tour.

She had never for a moment ceased to remember that the Dakota divorce-court was the objective point of this later honeymoon, and her allusions to the fact had become as frequent as prudence permitted. Peter seemed in no way disturbed by them. He responded with expressions of

increasing tenderness, or the purchase of another piece of jewelry; and though Undine could not remember his ever voluntarily bringing up the subject of their ultimate marriage he did not shrink from her recurring mention of it. He seemed merely too steeped in present well-being to think of the future; and Undine knew him. well enough to be aware that his faculty of enjoyment could not project itself beyond the moment. Her business, therefore, was to make each day so agreeable that when the last of them came he should be conscious of a void to be bridged over as quickly as possible; and when she thought this point had been reached she packed her trunks and started for Dakota.

In the dreary evocation of her past, the next picture to follow was that of the dull months in the western divorce-town, where, to escape loneliness and avoid comment, she had cast in her lot with Mabel Lipscomb, who had recently arrived there on the same errand.

Undine had begun by being sorry for the friend whose new venture seemed likely to result so much less brilliantly than her own; but compassion had been replaced by a stealing irritation as Mabel's unpruned vulgarities, her enormous complacent satisfaction with herself and her surroundings, began to pervade every corner of their provisional household. Undine, at first, had been sustained by the fullest confidence in her own future. When she had parted from Van Degen she had felt sure he meant to marry her, and the fact that Mrs. Lipscomb had no similar hope on her horizon made her easier to bear with. Undine was almost ashamed that the unwooed Mabel should be the witness of her own felicity, and planned to send her off on a trip to Denver when Peter should announce his arrival; but the weeks passed, and Peter did not come. Mabel, on the whole, behaved well in this contingency. Undine, in her first exultation, had confided all her hopes and plans to her friend, but Mabel took no undue advantage of the fact. She was even tactful in her loud fond clumsy way, with a tact that insistently boomed and buzzed about its victim's head. But one day she blushingly mentioned that she had asked to dinner a gentleman from Little Rock who had come to Dakota with the same

object as themselves, and whose acquaintance she had made through her lawyer.

The gentleman from Little Rock came to dine, and a week later Undine understood that Mabel's future was assured. If Van Degen had been at hand Undine would have smiled with him at poor Mabel's impressionability and her suitor's crudeness. But Van Degen was not there. He had made no sign, he had sent no excuse; he had simply continued to absent himself; and it was Undine who, in due course, had to make way for Mrs. Lipscomb's caller, and sit upstairs with a novel while the drawing-room below was given up to the enacting of an actual lovestory.

Even then, even to the end, Undine had to admit that Mabel had behaved "beautifully." But it is comparatively easy to behave beautifully when one is getting what one wants, and when some one else, who has not always been altogether kind and considerate, is not. The net result of Mrs. Lipscomb's magnanimity was that when, on the day of parting, she drew Undine to her bosom with the hand on which her new engagement-ring blazed, Undine hated her as she hated everything else connected with her vain exile in the wilder

ness.

XXVI

THE next phase in the unrolling vision of Undine's past was the episode of her return to New York. She had gone to the Malibran, to her parents-for it was a moment in her career when she clung passionately to the conformities, and when the fact of being able to say: "I'm here with my father and mother" was worth paying for even in the stuffy discomfort of that grim abode. Nevertheless, it was an additional thorn in her pride that her parents could not-for the meanest of material reasons-transfer themselves, at her coming, to one of the big Fifth Avenue hotels. When she had suggested their doing so, Mr. Spragg had briefly replied that after the heavy expenses of her divorce suit he couldn't, for the moment, afford anything better than the Malibran; and this announcement cast a deeper gloom over her future.

It was not an occasion for being "ner

vous," however; she had learned too many hard facts in the last few months to think of having recourse to her youthful methods of getting what she wanted. And something told her that if she made the attempt it would have been useless. Her father and mother seemed much older, seemed tired and defeated, like herself.

Parents and daughter bore their common failure in a common silence, broken only by Mrs. Spragg's occasional timid allusions to her grandson. But her anecdotes of little Paul's exploits left a deeper silence behind them. Undine did not want to talk of her boy. She could forget him when, as she put it, things were "going her way," but in moments of discouragement the thought of him was an added element of bitterness, subtly different from her other bitter thoughts, and harder to quiet. It had not occurred to her to try to gain possession of the child. She was vaguely aware that the courts had given her his custody; but she had never seriously considered the possibility of asserting this claim. Her parents' restricted means and her own uncertain future made her regard the care of Paul as an additional burden, and she quieted her scruples by thinking of him as "better off" with Ralph's family, and of herself as rather touchingly disinterested in putting his welfare before her own. Poor Mrs. Spragg was pining for him, but Undine rejected her artless suggestion that Mrs. Heeny should be sent to "bring him round." "I wouldn't ask them a favour for the world-they're just waiting for a chance to spite me," Undine scornfully declared; but the fact of her boy's being so near, yet inaccessible, was bitter to her, and for the first time she was visited by unwonted questionings as to her own part in the calamity that had befallen her. She had voluntarily stepped out of her social frame, and the only person on whom she could with any satisfaction have laid the blame was the person to whom her thoughts now turned with a vague belated tenderness. It was thus, in fact, that Ralph's image presented itself to her. His pride, his reserve, all the secret expressions of his devotion, the tones of his voice, his quiet movements, even his puzzling irony: these seemed, in contrast to what she had since known, the very qualities

essential to her happiness. She could console herself only by regarding it as part of her sad lot that poverty, and the relentless animosity of his family, should have put an end to so perfect a union: in brooding over the subject she gradually began to see herself and Ralph as the victims of dark machinations, and when she mentioned him she spoke forgivingly, and implied that "everything might have been different" if "people" had not "come between" them.

She had arrived in New York in midseason, and the dread of meeting familiar faces kept her shut up in her room at the Malibran, reading innumerable novels and brooding over possibilities of escape. She tried to avoid seeing the daily papers, but they formed the staple diet of her parents, and now and then she could not help taking one up and turning to the "Society Column." Everybody was in town, and the social record glittered with wellknown names. It seemed to Undine that the season must be the gayest New York had ever known. The Harmon B. Driscolls, young Jim and his wife, the Thurber Van Degens, the Chauncey Ellings, and all the other Fifth Avenue potentates, seemed to have their doors perpetually open to a stream of revellers among whom the familiar presences of Grace Beringer, Bertha Shallum, Dicky Bowles and Claud Walsingham Popple, came and went with the irritating sameness of the figures in a stageprocession.

Among them also Peter Van Degen presently began to appear. He had been on a tour around the world, and Undine could not take up a newspaper without lighting on some allusion to his progress. After his return to New York she noticed that his name was usually coupled with his wife's: he and Clare seemed to be celebrating his home-coming in a series of brilliant festivities, and Undine guessed that he had special reasons for wishing to keep before the world the evidences of his conjugal entente.

Mrs. Heeny's "clippings" furnished her with such items as her own reading missed; and one day the masseuse appeared with a long article from the leading journal of Little Rock, recounting the brilliant nuptials of Mabel Lipscombnow Mrs. Homer Branney-and her de

parture for "the Coast" in the bridegroom's private car. This put the last touch to Undine's exasperation, and that day she got up earlier than usual, put on her most becoming dress, went for a quick walk around the Park, and told her father, when she came in, that she wanted him to take her to the opera that evening.

Mr. Spragg stared and frowned. "You mean you want me to go round and hire a box for you?"

"Oh, no."

Undine coloured at the infelicitous allusion: besides, she knew now that the smart people who were "musical" went in stalls.

"I only want two good seats. I don't see why I should stay shut up. I want you to go with me," she added.

Her father received the latter part of the request without comment: he seemed to have gone beyond surprise. But he appeared that evening at dinner in a creased and loosely fitting dress-suit which he had probably not put on since the last time he had dined with his sonin-law, and he and Undine drove off together, leaving Mrs. Spragg to gaze after them with the pale stare of Hecuba.

Their stalls were in the middle of the house, and around them swept the great curve of boxes at which Undine had so often looked up in the remote Stentorian days. Then it had been all one indistinguishable glitter, now it was full of familiar details: the house was thronged with people she knew, and every box seemed to contain a parcel of her past. At first she had shrunk from recognition; but gradually, as she perceived that no one noticed her, that she was merely part of the invisible crowd below the range of the encircling opera glasses, she felt a defiant desire to make herself seen. When the performance was over her father wanted to leave the house by the door at which they had entered, but she guided him toward the stockholders' entrance, and pressed her way through the packed vestibule, among the furred and jewelled splendours of the ladies waiting for their motors. "Oh, it's the wrong door-never mind, we'll walk to the corner and get a cab," she exclaimed, speaking loudly enough to be overheard. Two or three heads turned, and she met Dicky Bowles's glance, and returned his laughing bow. The woman