in herself. It exasperated her to think that he might have consolations for the outward monotony of his life, and she resolved that when they returned to Paris he should see that she was not without similar opportunities.
March, meanwhile, was verging on April, and still he did not speak of leaving. Undine had learned that he expected to have such decisions left to him, and she hid her impatience lest her showing it should incline him to delay. But one day, as she sat at tea in the gallery, he came in in his riding-clothes and said: “I’ve been over to the other side of the mountain. The February rains have weakened the dam of the Alette, and the vineyards will be in danger if we don’t rebuild at once.”
She suppressed a yawn, thinking, as she did so, how dull he always looked when he talked of agriculture. It made him seem years older, and she reflected with a shiver that listening to him probably gave her the same look.
He went on, as she handed him his tea: “I’m sorry it should happen just now. I’m afraid I shall have to ask you to give up your spring in Paris.” “Oh, no—no!” she broke out. A throng of half-subdued grievances choked in her: she wanted to burst into sobs like a child.
“I know it’s a disappointment. But our expenses have been unusually heavy this year.”
“It seems to me they always are. I don’t see why we should give up Paris because you’ve got to make repairs to a dam. Isn’t Hubert ever going to pay back that money?”
He looked at her with a mild surprise. “But surely you understood at the time that it won’t be possible till his wife inherits?”
“Till General Arlington dies, you mean? He doesn’t look much older than you!”
“You may remember that I showed you Hubert’s note. He has paid the interest quite regularly.”
“That’s kind of him!” She stood up, flaming with rebellion. “You can do as you please; but I mean to go to Paris.”
“My mother is not going. I didn’t intend to open our apartment.”
“I understand. But I shall open it—that’s all!”
He had risen too, and she saw his face whiten. “I prefer that you shouldn’t go without me.”
“Then I shall go and stay at the Nouveau Luxe with my American friends.”
“That never!”
“Why not?”
“I consider it unsuitable.”
“Your considering it so doesn’t prove it.”
They stood facing each other, quivering with an equal anger; then he controlled himself and said in a more conciliatory tone: “You never seem to see that there are necessities—”
“Oh, neither do you—that’s the trouble. You can’t keep me shut up here all my life, and interfere with everything I want to do, just by saying it’s unsuitable.”
“I’ve never interfered with your spending your money as you please.”
It was her turn to stare, sincerely wondering. “Mercy, I should hope not, when you’ve always grudged me every penny of yours!”
“You know it’s not because I grudge it. I would gladly take you to Paris if I had the money.”
“You can always find the money to spend on this place. Why don’t you sell it if it’s so fearfully expensive?”
“Sell it? Sell Saint Desert?”
The suggestion seemed to strike him as something monstrously, almost fiendishly significant: as if her random word had at last thrust into his hand the clue to their whole unhappy difference. Without understanding this, she guessed it from the change in his face: it was as if a deadly solvent had suddenly decomposed its familiar lines.
“Well, why not?” His horror spurred her on. “You might sell some of the things in it anyhow. In America we’re not ashamed to sell what we can’t afford to keep.” Her eyes fell on the storied hangings at his back. “Why, there’s a fortune in this one room: you could get anything you chose for those tapestries. And you stand here and tell me you’re a pauper!”
His glance followed hers to the tapestries, and then returned to her face. “Ah, you don’t understand,” he said.
“I understand that you care for all this old stuff more than you do for me, and that you’d rather see me unhappy and miserable than touch one of your great-grandfather’s armchairs.”
The colour came slowly back to his face, but it hardened into lines she had never seen. He looked at her as though the place where she stood were empty. “You don’t understand,” he said again.
XLI
The incident left Undine with the baffled feeling of not being able to count on any of her old weapons of aggression. In all her struggles for authority her sense of the rightfulness of her cause had been measured by her power of making people do as she pleased. Raymond’s firmness shook her faith in her own claims, and a blind desire to wound and destroy replaced her usual business-like intentness on gaining her end. But her ironies were as ineffectual as her arguments, and his imperviousness was the more exasperating because she divined that some of the things she said would have hurt him if any one else had said them: it was the fact of their coming from her that made them innocuous. Even when, at the close of their talk, she had burst out: “If you grudge me everything I care about we’d better separate,” he had merely answered with a shrug: “It’s one of the things we don’t do—” and the answer had been like the slamming of an iron door in her face.
An interval of silent brooding had resulted in a reaction of rebellion. She dared not carry out her threat of joining her compatriots at the Nouveau Luxe: she had too clear a memory of the results of her former revolt. But neither could she submit to her present fate without attempting to make Raymond understand his selfish folly. She
