XX

Some six weeks later. Undine Marvell stood at the window smiling down on

her recovered Paris.

Her hotel sitting-room had, as usual, been flowered, cushioned and

lamp-shaded into a delusive semblance of stability; and she had really

felt, for the last few weeks, that the life she was leading there must

be going to last--it seemed so perfect an answer to all her wants!

As she looked out at the thronged street, on which the summer light lay

like a blush of pleasure, she felt herself naturally akin to all the

bright and careless freedom of the scene. She had been away from

Paris for two days, and the spectacle before her seemed more rich and

suggestive after her brief absence from it. Her senses luxuriated in all

its material details: the thronging motors, the brilliant shops, the

novelty and daring of the women's dresses, the piled-up colours of

the ambulant flower-carts, the appetizing expanse of the fruiterers'

windows, even the chromatic effects of the petits fours behind the

plate-glass of the pastry-cooks: all the surface-sparkle and variety of

the inexhaustible streets of Paris.

The scene before her typified to Undine her first real taste of life.

How meagre and starved the past appeared in comparison with this

abundant present! The noise, the crowd, the promiscuity beneath her eyes

symbolized the glare and movement of her life. Every moment of her days

was packed with excitement and exhilaration. Everything amused her: the

long hours of bargaining and debate with dress-makers and jewellers, the

crowded lunches at fashionable restaurants, the perfunctory dash through

a picture-show or the lingering visit to the last new milliner; the

afternoon motor-rush to some leafy suburb, where tea and musics and

sunset were hastily absorbed on a crowded terrace above the Seine; the

whirl home through the Bois to dress for dinner and start again on the

round of evening diversions; the dinner at the Nouveau Luxe or the

Café de Paris, and the little play at the Capucines or the Variétés,

followed, because the night was "too lovely," and it was a shame to

waste it, by a breathless flight back to the Bois, with supper in one

of its lamp-hung restaurants, or, if the weather forbade, a tumultuous

progress through the midnight haunts where "ladies" were not supposed

to show themselves, and might consequently taste the thrill of being

occasionally taken for their opposites.

As the varied vision unrolled itself, Undine contrasted it with the pale

monotony of her previous summers. The one she most resented was the

first after her marriage, the European summer out of whose joys she had

been cheated by her own ignorance and Ralph's perversity. They had been

free then, there had been no child to hamper their movements, their

money anxieties had hardly begun, the face of life had been fresh and

radiant, and she had been doomed to waste such opportunities on a

succession of ill-smelling Italian towns. She still felt it to be her

deepest grievance against her husband; and now that, after four years of

petty household worries, another chance of escape had come, he already

wanted to drag her back to bondage!

This fit of retrospection had been provoked by two letters which had

come that morning. One was from Ralph, who began by reminding her that

he had not heard from her for weeks, and went on to point out, in his

usual tone of good-humoured remonstrance, that since her departure the

drain on her letter of credit had been deep and constant. "I wanted

you," he wrote, "to get all the fun you could out of the money I made

last spring; but I didn't think you'd get through it quite so fast. Try

to come home without leaving too many bills behind you. Your illness and

Paul's cost more than I expected, and Lipscomb has had a bad knock in

Wall Street, and hasn't yet paid his first quarter..."

Always the same monotonous refrain! Was it her fault that she and the

boy had been ill? Or that Harry Lipscomb had been "on the wrong side" of

Wall Street? Ralph seemed to have money on the brain: his business life

had certainly deteriorated him. And, since he hadn't made a success of

it after all, why shouldn't he turn back to literature and try to write

his novel? Undine, the previous winter, had been dazzled by the figures

which a well-known magazine editor, whom she had met at dinner had named

as within reach of the successful novelist. She perceived for the first

time that literature was becoming fashionable, and instantly decided

that it would be amusing and original if she and Ralph should owe their

prosperity to his talent. She already saw herself, as the wife of a

celebrated author, wearing "artistic" dresses and doing the drawing-room

over with Gothic tapestries and dim lights in altar candle-sticks. But

when she suggested Ralph's taking up his novel he answered with a laugh

that his brains were sold to the firm--that when he came back at night

the tank was empty...And now he wanted her to sail for home in a week!

The other letter excited a deeper resentment. It was an appeal from

Laura Fairford to return and look after Ralph. He was overworked and out

of spirits, she wrote, and his mother and sister, reluctant as they

were to interfere, felt they ought to urge Undine to come back to him.

Details followed, unwelcome and officious. What right had Laura Fairford

to preach to her of wifely obligations? No doubt Charles Bowen had sent

home a highly-coloured report--and there was really a certain irony in

Mrs. Fairford's criticizing her sister-in-law's conduct on information

obtained from such a source! Undine turned from the window and threw

herself down on her deeply cushioned sofa. She was feeling the pleasant

fatigue consequent on her trip to the country, whither she and Mrs.

Shallum had gone with Raymond de Chelles to spend a night at the old

Marquis's chateau. When her travelling companions, an hour earlier, had

left her at her door, she had half-promised to rejoin them for a late

dinner in the Bois; and as she leaned back among the cushions disturbing

thoughts were banished by the urgent necessity of deciding what dress

she should wear.

These bright weeks of the Parisian spring had given her a first real

glimpse into the art of living. From the experts who had taught her to

subdue the curves of her figure and soften her bright free stare with

dusky pencillings, to the skilled purveyors of countless forms of

pleasure--the theatres and restaurants, the green and blossoming

suburbs, the whole shining shifting spectacle of nights and days--every

sight and sound and word had combined to charm her perceptions and

refine her taste. And her growing friendship with Raymond de Chelles had

been the most potent of these influences.

Chelles, at once immensely "taken," had not only shown his eagerness to

share in the helter-skelter motions of Undine's party, but had given her

glimpses of another, still more brilliant existence, that life of the

inaccessible "Faubourg" of which the first tantalizing hints had but

lately reached her. Hitherto she had assumed that Paris existed for the

stranger, that its native life was merely an obscure foundation for

the dazzling superstructure of hotels and restaurants in which her

compatriots disported themselves. But lately she had begun to hear

about other American women, the women who had married into the French

aristocracy, and who led, in the high-walled houses beyond the Seine

which she had once thought so dull and dingy, a life that made her own

seem as undistinguished as the social existence of the Mealey

House. Perhaps what most exasperated her was the discovery, in this

impenetrable group, of the Miss Wincher who had poisoned her far-off

summer at Potash Springs. To recognize her old enemy in the Marquise de

Trezac who so frequently figured in the Parisian chronicle was the more

irritating to Undine because her intervening social experiences had

caused her to look back on Nettie Wincher as a frumpy girl who wouldn't

have "had a show" in New York.

Once more all the accepted values were reversed, and it turned out that

Miss Wincher had been in possession of some key to success on which

Undine had not yet put her hand. To know that others were indifferent to

what she had thought important was to cheapen all present pleasure and

turn the whole force of her desires in a new direction. What she wanted

for the moment was to linger on in Paris, prolonging her flirtation with

Chelles, and profiting by it to detach herself from her compatriots and

enter doors closed to their approach. And Chelles himself attracted

her: she thought him as "sweet" as she had once thought Ralph, whose

fastidiousness and refinement were blent in him with a delightful

foreign vivacity. His chief value, however, lay in his power of exciting

Van Degen's jealousy. She knew enough of French customs to be aware that

such devotion as Chelles' was not likely to have much practical bearing

on her future; but Peter had an alarming way of lapsing into security,

and as a spur to his ardour she knew the value of other men's

attentions.

It had become Undine's fixed purpose to bring Van Degen to a definite

expression of his intentions. The case of Indiana Frusk, whose brilliant

marriage the journals of two continents had recently chronicled with

unprecedented richness of detail, had made less impression on him than

she hoped. He treated it as a comic episode without special bearing on

their case, and once, when Undine cited Rolliver's expensive fight for

freedom as an instance of the power of love over the most invulnerable

natures, had answered carelessly: "Oh, his first wife was a laundress, I

believe."

But all about them couples were unpairing and pairing again with an ease

and rapidity that encouraged Undine to bide her time. It was simply a

question of making Van Degen want her enough, and of not being obliged

to abandon the game before he wanted her as much as she meant he should.

This was precisely what would happen if she were compelled to leave

Paris now. Already the event had shown how right she had been to come

abroad: the attention she attracted in Paris had reawakened Van Degen's

fancy, and her hold over him was stronger than when they had parted

in America. But the next step must be taken with coolness and

circumspection; and she must not throw away what she had gained by going

away at a stage when he was surer of her than she of him. She was still

intensely considering these questions when the door behind her opened

and he came in.

She looked up with a frown and he gave a deprecating laugh. "Didn't I

knock? Don't look so savage! They told me downstairs you'd got back, and

I just bolted in without thinking."

He had widened and purpled since their first encounter, five years

earlier, but his features had not matured. His face was still the

face of a covetous bullying boy, with a large appetite for primitive

satisfactions and a sturdy belief in his intrinsic right to them. It was

all the more satisfying to Undine's vanity to see his look change at her

tone from command to conciliation, and from conciliation to the entreaty

of a capriciously-treated animal.

"What a ridiculous hour for a visit!" she exclaimed, ignoring his

excuse. "Well, if you disappear like that, without a word--"

"I told my maid to telephone you I was going away."

"You couldn't make time to do it yourself, I suppose?"

"We rushed off suddenly; I'd hardly time to get to the station."

"You rushed off where, may I ask?" Van Degen still lowered down on her.

"Oh didn't I tell you? I've been down staying at Chelles' chateau in

Burgundy." Her face lit up and she raised herself eagerly on her elbow.

"It's the most wonderful old house you ever saw: a real castle, with

towers, and water all round it, and a funny kind of bridge they pull up.

Chelles said he wanted me to see just how they lived at home, and I did;

I saw everything: the tapestries that Louis Quinze gave them, and the

family portraits, and the chapel, where their own priest says mass, and

they sit by themselves in a balcony with crowns all over it. The priest

was a lovely old man--he said he'd give anything to convert me. Do you

know, I think there's something very beautiful about the Roman Catholic

religion? I've often felt I might have been happier if I'd had some

religious influence in my life."

She sighed a little, and turned her head away. She flattered herself

that she had learned to strike the right note with Van Degen. At this

crucial stage he needed a taste of his own methods, a glimpse of the

fact that there were women in the world who could get on without him.

He continued to gaze down at her sulkily. "Were the old people there?

You never told me you knew his mother."

"I don't. They weren't there. But it didn't make a bit of difference,

because Raymond sent down a cook from the Luxe."

"Oh, Lord," Van Degen groaned, dropping down on the end of the sofa.

"Was the cook got down to chaperon you?"