He had expected to find Undine still out; but on the stairs he crossed
Mrs. Shallum, who threw at him from under an immense hat-brim: "Yes,
she's in, but you'd better come and have tea with me at the Luxe. I
don't think husbands are wanted!"
Ralph laughingly rejoined that that was just the moment for them to
appear; and Mrs. Shallum swept on, crying back: "All the same, I'll wait
for you!"
In the sitting-room Ralph found Undine seated behind a tea-table on the
other side of which, in an attitude of easy intimacy, Peter Van Degen
stretched his lounging length.
He did not move on Ralph's appearance, no doubt thinking their kinship
close enough to make his nod and "Hullo!" a sufficient greeting. Peter
in intimacy was given to miscalculations of the sort, and Ralph's first
movement was to glance at Undine and see how it affected her. But her
eyes gave out the vivid rays that noise and banter always struck from
them; her face, at such moments, was like a theatre with all the lustres
blazing. That the illumination should have been kindled by his cousin's
husband was not precisely agreeable to Marvell, who thought Peter a bore
in society and an insufferable nuisance on closer terms. But he was
becoming blunted to Undine's lack of discrimination; and his own
treatment of Van Degen was always tempered by his sympathy for Clare.
He therefore listened with apparent good-humour to Peter's suggestion of
an evening at a petit theatre with the Harvey Shallums, and joined in
the laugh with which Undine declared: "Oh, Ralph won't go--he only
likes the theatres where they walk around in bathtowels and talk
poetry.--Isn't that what you've just been seeing?" she added, with a
turn of the neck that shed her brightness on him.
"What? One of those five-barrelled shows at the Français? Great Scott,
Ralph--no wonder your wife's pining for the Folies Bergère!"
"She needn't, my dear fellow. We never interfere with each other's
vices."
Peter, unsolicited, was comfortably lighting a cigarette. "Ah, there's
the secret of domestic happiness. Marry somebody who likes all the
things you don't, and make love to somebody who likes all the things you
do."
Undine laughed appreciatively. "Only it dooms poor Ralph to such awful
frumps. Can't you see the sort of woman who'd love his sort of play?"
"Oh, I can see her fast enough--my wife loves 'em," said their visitor,
rising with a grin; while Ralph threw, out: "So don't waste your pity on
me!" and Undine's laugh had the slight note of asperity that the mention
of Clare always elicited.
"To-morrow night, then, at Paillard's," Van Degen concluded. "And about
the other business--that's a go too? I leave it to you to settle the
date."
The nod and laugh they exchanged seemed to hint at depths of collusion
from which Ralph was pointedly excluded; and he wondered how large
a programme of pleasure they had already had time to sketch out. He
disliked the idea of Undine's being too frequently seen with Van Degen,
whose Parisian reputation was not fortified by the connections that
propped it up in New York; but he did not want to interfere with her
pleasure, and he was still wondering what to say when, as the door
closed, she turned to him gaily.
"I'm so glad you've come! I've got some news for you." She laid a light
touch on his arm.
Touch and tone were enough to disperse his anxieties, and he answered
that he was in luck to find her already in when he had supposed her
engaged, over a Nouveau Luxe tea-table, in repairing the afternoon's
ravages.
"Oh, I didn't shop much--I didn't stay out long." She raised a kindling
face to him. "And what do you think I've been doing? While you were
sitting in your stuffy old theatre, worrying about the money I was
spending (oh, you needn't fib--I know you were!) I was saving you
hundreds and thousands. I've saved you the price of our passage!"
Ralph laughed in pure enjoyment of her beauty. When she shone on him
like that what did it matter what nonsense she talked?
"You wonderful woman--how did you do it? By countermanding a tiara?"
"You know I'm not such a fool as you pretend!" She held him at arm's
length with a nod of joyous mystery. "You'll simply never guess! I've
made Peter Van Degen ask us to go home on the Sorceress. What. do you
say to that?"
She flashed it out on a laugh of triumph, without appearing to have a
doubt of the effect the announcement would produce.