“No.”
“And he stopped writing?”
“Oh, he never writes.”
Indiana heaved a deep sigh of intelligence. “There’s one perfectly clear rule: never let out of your sight a man who doesn’t write.”
“I know. That’s why I stayed with him—those few weeks last summer….”
Indiana sat thinking, her fine shallow eyes fixed unblinkingly on her friend’s embarrassed face.
“I suppose there isn’t anybody else—?”
“Anybody—?”
“Well—now you’ve got your divorce: anybody else it would come in handy for?”
This was harder to bear than anything that had gone before: Undine could not have borne it if she had not had a purpose. “Mr. Van Degen owes it to me—” she began with an air of wounded dignity.
“Yes, yes: I know. But that’s just talk. If there IS anybody else—”
“I can’t imagine what you think of me, Indiana!”
Indiana, without appearing to resent this challenge, again lost herself in meditation.
“Well, I’ll tell him he’s just GOT to see you,” she finally emerged from it to say.
Undine gave a quick upward look: this was what she had been waiting for ever since she had read, a few days earlier, in the columns of her morning journal, that Mr. Peter Van Degen and Mr. and Mrs. James J. Rolliver had been fellow-passengers on board the Semantic. But she did not betray her expectations by as much as the tremor of an eye-lash. She knew her friend well enough to pour out to her the expected tribute of surprise.
“Why, do you mean to say you know him, Indiana?”
“Mercy, yes! He’s round here all the time. He crossed on the steamer with us, and Mr. Rolliver’s taken a fancy to him,” Indiana explained, in the tone of the absorbed bride to whom her husband’s preferences are the sole criterion.
Undine turned a tear-suffused gaze on her. “Oh, Indiana, if I could only see him again I know it would be all right! He’s awfully, awfully fond of me; but his family have influenced him against me—”
“I know what THAT is!” Mrs. Rolliver interjected.
“But perhaps,” Undine continued, “it would be better if I could meet him first without his knowing beforehand—without your telling him … I love him too much to reproach him!” she added nobly.
Indiana pondered: it was clear that, though the nobility of the sentiment impressed her, she was disinclined to renounce the idea of taking a more active part in her friend’s rehabilitation. But Undine went on: “Of course you’ve found out by this time that he’s just a big spoiled baby. Afterward—when I’ve seen him—if you’d talk to him; or it you’d only just let him BE with you, and see how perfectly happy you and Mr. Rolliver are!”
Indiana seized on this at once. “You mean that what he wants is the influence of a home like ours? Yes, yes, I understand. I tell you what I’ll do: I’ll just ask him round to dine, and let you know the day, without telling him beforehand that you’re coming.”
“Oh, Indiana!” Undine held her in a close embrace, and then drew away to say: “I’m so glad I found you. You must go round with me everywhere. There are lots of people here I want you to know.”
Mrs. Rolliver’s expression changed from vague sympathy to concentrated interest. “I suppose it’s awfully gay here? Do you go round a great deal with the American set?”
Undine hesitated for a fraction of a moment. “There are a few of them who are rather jolly. But I particularly want you to meet my friend the Marquis Roviano—he’s from Rome; and a lovely Austrian woman, Baroness Adelschein.”
Her friend’s face was brushed by a shade of distrust. “I don’t know as I care much about meeting foreigners,” she said indifferently.
Undine smiled: it was agreeable at last to be able to give Indiana a “point” as valuable as any of hers on divorce.
“Oh, some of them are awfully attractive; and THEY’LL make you meet the Americans.”
Indiana caught this on the bound: one began to see why she had got on in spite of everything.
“Of course I’d love to know your friends,” she said, kissing Undine; who answered, giving back the kiss:
“You know there’s nothing on earth I wouldn’t do for you.”
Indiana drew back to look at her with a comic grimace under which a shade of anxiety was visible. “Well, that’s a pretty large order. But there’s just one thing you CAN do, dearest: please to let Mr. Rolliver alone!”
“Mr. Rolliver, my dear?” Undine’s laugh showed that she took this for unmixed comedy. “That’s a nice way to remind me that you’re heaps and heaps better-looking than I am!”
Indiana gave her an acute glance. “Millard Binch didn’t think so—not even at the very end.”
“Oh, poor Millard!” The women’s smiles mingled easily over the common reminiscence, and once again, on the threshold. Undine enfolded her friend. In the light of the autumn afternoon she paused a moment at the door of the Nouveau Luxe, and looked aimlessly forth at the brave spectacle in which she seemed no longer to have a stake.
Many of her old friends had already returned to Paris: the Harvey Shallums, May Beringer, Dicky Bowles and other westward-bound nomads lingering on for a glimpse of the autumn theatres and fashions before hurrying back to inaugurate the New York season. A year ago Undine would have had no difficulty in introducing Indiana Rolliver to this group—a group above which her own aspirations already beat an impatient wing. Now her place in it had become too precarious for her to force an entrance for her protectress. Her New York friends were at no pains to conceal from her that in their opinion her divorce had been a blunder. Their logic was that of Apex reversed. Since she had not been “sure” of Van Degen, why in the world, they asked, had she thrown away a position she WAS sure of? Mrs. Harvey Shallum, in particular, had not scrupled to put the question squarely. “Chelles was awfully taken—he would have introduced you everywhere. I thought you were wild to know smart French people; I thought Harvey and I weren’t good enough for you any longer. And now you’ve done your best to spoil everything! Of course I feel for you tremendously—that’s the reason why I’m talking so frankly. You must be horribly depressed. Come and dine tonight—or no, if you don’t mind I’d rather you chose another evening. I’d forgotten that I’d asked the Jim Driscolls, and it might be uncomfortable—for YOU….”
In another world she was still welcome, at first perhaps even more so than before: the world, namely, to which she had proposed to present Indiana Rolliver. Roviano, Madame Adelschein, and a few of the freer spirits of her old St. Moritz band, reappearing in Paris with the close of the watering-place season, had quickly discovered her and shown a keen interest in her liberation. It appeared in some mysterious way to make her more available for their purpose, and she found that, in the character of the last American divorcee, she was even regarded as eligible to the small and intimate inner circle of their loosely-knit association. At first she could not make out what had entitled her to this privilege, and increasing enlightenment produced a revolt of the Apex puritanism which, despite some odd accommodations and compliances, still carried its head so high in her.
Undine had been perfectly sincere in telling Indiana Rolliver that she was not “an Immoral woman.” The pleasures for which her sex took such risks had never attracted her, and she did not even crave the excitement of having it thought that they did. She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability; and despite her surface-sophistication her notion of amusement was hardly less innocent than when she had hung on the plumber’s fence with Indiana Frusk.