Undine flushed to the forehead. She had grown
accustomed to such allusions and the thought of having
a child no longer filled her with the resentful terror
she had felt before Paul’s birth. She had
been insensibly influenced by a different point of
view, perhaps also by a difference in her own feeling;
and the vision of herself as the mother of the future
Marquis de Chelles was softened to happiness by the
thought of giving Raymond a son. But all these
lightly-rooted sentiments went down in the rush of
her resentment, and she freed herself with a petulant
movement. “Oh, my dear, you’d better
leave it to your brother to perpetuate the race.
There’ll be more room for nurseries in their
apartment!”
She waited a moment, quivering with the expectation
of her husband’s answer; then, as none came
except the silent darkening of his face, she walked
to the door and turned round to fling back: “Of
course you can do what you like with your own house,
and make any arrangements that suit your family, without
consulting me; but you needn’t think I’m
ever going back to live in that stuffy little hole,
with Hubert and his wife splurging round on top of
our heads!”
“Ah—” said Raymond de Chelles
in a low voice.
XXXIX
Undine did not fulfil her threat. The month of
May saw her back in the rooms she had declared she
would never set foot in, and after her long sojourn
among the echoing vistas of Saint Desert the exiguity
of her Paris quarters seemed like cosiness.
In the interval many things had happened. Hubert,
permitted by his anxious relatives to anticipate the
term of the family mourning, had been showily and
expensively united to his heiress; the Hotel de Chelles
had been piped, heated and illuminated in accordance
with the bride’s requirements; and the young
couple, not content with these utilitarian changes
had moved doors, opened windows, torn down partitions,
and given over the great trophied and pilastered dining-room
to a decorative painter with a new theory of the human
anatomy. Undine had silently assisted at this
spectacle, and at the sight of the old Marquise’s
abject acquiescence; she had seen the Duchesse de Dordogne
and the Princesse Estradina go past her door to visit
Hubert’s premier and marvel at the American
bath-tubs and the Annamite bric-a-brac; and she had
been present, with her husband, at the banquet at which
Hubert had revealed to the astonished Faubourg the
prehistoric episodes depicted on his dining-room walls.
She had accepted all these necessities with the stoicism
which the last months had developed in her; for more
and more, as the days passed, she felt herself in
the grasp of circumstances stronger than any effort
she could oppose to them. The very absence of
external pressure, of any tactless assertion of authority
on her husband’s part, intensified the sense
of her helplessness. He simply left it to her
to infer that, important as she might be to him in
certain ways, there were others in which she did not
weigh a feather.
