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Updated: May 29, 2025
Undine, in the ensuing days, was no less often with Madame Adelschein, and Ralph suspected a challenge in her open frequentation of the lady. But if challenge there were, he let it lie. Whether his wife saw more or less of Madame Adelschein seemed no longer of much consequence: she had so amply shown him her ability to protect herself.
Undine, as she dropped down on the sofa and unpinned her hat, shed on him the light of her guileless gaze. "I don't know: everybody was amusing. The Marquis is awfully bright." "I'd no idea you or Bertha Shallum knew Madame Adelschein well enough to take her off with you in that way." Undine sat absently smoothing the tuft of glossy cock's-feathers in her hat.
If there was one point on which she was doggedly and puritanically resolved, it was that no extremes of social adversity should ever again draw her into the group of people among whom Madame Adelschein too conspicuously figured.
She came back late, flushed with her long walk, her face all sparkle and mystery, as he had seen it in the first days of their courtship; and the look somehow revived his irritated sense of having been intentionally left out of the party. "You've been gone forever. Was it the Adelschein who made you go such lengths?" he asked her, trying to keep to his usual joking tone.
Knowing what strange specimens from the depths slip through the wide meshes of the watering-place world, he had foreseen that a meeting with the Baroness Adelschein was inevitable; but he had not expected her to become one of his wife's intimate circle.
"My cousin's extremely amusing, of course, but utterly mad and very mal entourée. Most of the people she has about her ought to be in prison or Bedlam: especially that unspeakable Madame Adelschein, who's a candidate for both. My aunt's an angel, but she's been weak enough to let Lili turn the Hotel de Dordogne into an annex of Montmartre.
Society, to everybody here, means the sanction of their own special group and of the corresponding groups elsewhere. The Adelschein goes about in a place like this because it's nobody's business to stop her; but the women who tolerate her here would drop her like a shot if she set foot on their own ground."
"No one's ever yet gone any farther with me than I wanted!" she declared. She was really exquisitely simple. "I'm not sure Roviano hasn't, in vouching for Madame Adelschein. But he probably thinks you know about her. To him this isn't 'society' any more than the people in an omnibus are.
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."
She took up Madame Adelschein, she entertained the James J. Rollivers, she resuscitated Creole dishes, she patronized negro melodists, she abandoned her weekly teas for impromptu afternoon dances, and the prim drawing-room in which dowagers had droned echoed with a cosmopolitan hubbub.
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