enough to condemn his wife to perpetual exile. He meant, he assured her, that she should have her annual spring visit to Paris—but he stared in dismay at her suggestion that they should take possession of the coveted premier of the Hotel de Chelles. He was gallant enough to express the wish that it were in his power to house her on such a scale; but he could not conceal his surprise that she had ever seriously expected it. She was beginning to see that he felt her constitutional inability to understand anything about money as the deepest difference between them. It was a proficiency no one had ever expected her to acquire, and the lack of which she had even been encouraged to regard as a grace and to use as a pretext. During the interval between her divorce and her remarriage she had learned what things cost, but not how to do without them; and money still seemed to her like some mysterious and uncertain stream which occasionally vanished underground but was sure to bubble up again at one’s feet. Now, however, she found herself in a world where it represented not the means of individual gratification but the substance binding together whole groups of interests, and where the uses to which it might be put in twenty years were considered before the reasons for spending it on the spot. At first she was sure she could laugh Raymond out of his prudence or coax him round to her point of view. She did not understand how a man so romantically in love could be so unpersuadable on certain points. Hitherto she had had to contend with personal moods, now she was arguing against a policy; and she was gradually to learn that it was as natural to Raymond de Chelles to adore her and resist her as it had been to Ralph Marvell to adore her and let her have her way. At first, indeed, he appealed to her good sense, using arguments evidently drawn from accumulations of hereditary experience. But his economic plea was as unintelligible to her as the silly problems about pen-knives and apples in the “Mental Arithmetic” of her infancy; and when he struck a tenderer note and spoke of the duty of providing for the son he hoped for, she put her arms about him to whisper: “But then I oughtn’t to be worried…”
After that, she noticed, though he was as charming as ever, he behaved as if the case were closed. He had apparently decided that his arguments were unintelligible to her, and under all his ardour she felt the difference made by the discovery. It did not make him less kind, but it evidently made her less important; and she had the half-frightened sense that the day she ceased to please him she would cease to exist for him. That day was a long way off, of course, but the chill of it had brushed her face; and she was no longer heedless of such signs. She resolved to cultivate all the arts of patience and compliance, and habit might have helped them to take root if they had not been nipped by a new cataclysm.
It was barely a week ago that her husband had been called to Paris to straighten out a fresh tangle in the affairs of the troublesome brother whose difficulties were apparently a part of the family tradition. Raymond’s letters had been hurried, his telegrams brief and contradictory, and now, as Undine stood watching for the brougham that was to bring him from the station, she had the sense that with his arrival all her vague fears would be confirmed. There would be more money to pay out, of course—since the funds that could not be found for her just needs were apparently always forthcoming to settle Hubert’s scandalous prodigalities—and that meant a longer perspective of solitude at Saint Desert, and a fresh pretext for postponing the hospitalities that were to follow on their period of mourning. The brougham—a vehicle as massive and lumbering as the pair that drew it— presently rolled into the court, and Raymond’s sable figure (she had never before seen a man travel in such black clothes) sprang up the steps to the door. Whenever Undine saw him after an absence she had a curious sense of his coming back from unknown distances and not belonging to her or to any state of things she understood. Then habit reasserted itself, and she began to think of him again with a querulous familiarity. But she had learned to hide her feelings, and as he came in she put up her face for a kiss.
“Yes—everything’s settled—” his embrace expressed the satisfaction of the man returning from an accomplished task to the joys of his fireside.
“Settled?” Her face kindled. “Without your having to pay?”
He looked at her with a shrug. “Of course I’ve had to pay. Did you suppose Hubert’s creditors would be put off with vanilla eclairs?”
“Oh, if THAT’S what you mean—if Hubert has only to wire you at any time to be sure of his affairs being settled—!”
She saw his lips narrow and a line come out between his eyes. “Wouldn’t it be a happy thought to tell them to bring tea?” he suggested.
“In the library, then. It’s so cold here—and the tapestries smell so of rain.”
He paused a moment to scrutinize the long walls, on which the fabulous blues and pinks of the great Boucher series looked as livid as withered roses. “I suppose they ought to be taken down and aired,” he said.
She thought: “In THIS air—much good it would do them!” But she had already repented her outbreak about Hubert, and she followed her husband into the library with the resolve not to let him see her annoyance. Compared with the long grey gallery the library, with its brown walls of books, looked warm and home-like, and Raymond seemed to feel the influence of the softer atmosphere. He turned to his wife and put his arm about her.
“I know it’s been a trial to you, dearest; but this is the last time I shall have to pull the poor boy out.”
In spite of herself she laughed incredulously: Hubert’s “last times” were a household word.
But when tea had been brought, and they were alone over the fire, Raymond unfolded the amazing sequel. Hubert had found an heiress, Hubert was to be married, and henceforth the business of paying his debts (which might be counted on to recur as inevitably as the changes of the seasons) would devolve on his American bride— the charming Miss Looty Arlington, whom Raymond had remained over in Paris to meet.
“An American? He’s marrying an American?” Undine wavered between wrath and satisfaction. She felt a flash of resentment at any other intruder’s venturing upon her territory—(“Looty Arlington? Who is she? What a name!”)—but it was quickly superseded by the relief of knowing that henceforth, as Raymond said, Hubert’s debts would be some one else’s business. Then a third consideration prevailed. “But if he’s engaged to a rich girl, why on earth do WE have to pull him out?”
Her husband explained that no other course was possible. Though General Arlington was immensely wealthy, (“her father’s a general—a General Manager, whatever that may be,”) he had exacted what he called “a clean slate” from his future son-in-law, and Hubert’s creditors (the boy was such a donkey!) had in their possession certain papers that made it possible for them to press for immediate payment.
“Your compatriots’ views on such matters are so rigid—and it’s all to their credit—that the marriage would have fallen through at once if the least hint of Hubert’s mess had got out—and then we should have had him on our hands for life.”
Yes—from that point of view it was doubtless best to pay up; but Undine obscurely wished that their doing so had not incidentally helped an unknown compatriot to what the American papers were no doubt already announcing as “another brilliant foreign alliance.”
“Where on earth did your brother pick up anybody respectable? Do you know where her people come from? I suppose she’s perfectly awful,” she broke out with a sudden escape of irritation.
“I believe Hubert made her acquaintance at a skating rink. They come from some new state—the general
