It was the same perpetually reiterated condolence;
and Undine flushed with anger as she listened.
Why indeed had she let herself be cooped up?
She could not have answered the Princess’s question:
she merely felt the impossibility of breaking through
the mysterious web of traditions, conventions, prohibitions
that enclosed her in their impenetrable net-work.
But her vanity suggested the obvious pretext, and she
murmured with a laugh: “I didn’t
know Raymond was going to be so jealous—”
The Princess stared. “Is it Raymond who
keeps you shut up here? And what about his trips
to Dijon? And what do you suppose he does with
himself when he runs up to Paris? Politics?”
She shrugged ironically. “Politics don’t
occupy a man after midnight. Raymond jealous of
you? Ah, merci! My dear, it’s what
I always say when people talk to me about fast Americans:
you’re the only innocent women left in the world...”
After the Princess Estradina’s departure, the
days at Saint Desert succeeded each other indistinguishably;
and more and more, as they passed, Undine felt herself
drawn into the slow strong current already fed by
so many tributary lives. Some spell she could
not have named seemed to emanate from the old house
which had so long been the custodian of an unbroken
tradition: things had happened there in the same
way for so many generations that to try to alter them
seemed as vain as to contend with the elements.
Winter came and went, and once more the calendar marked
the first days of spring; but though the horse-chestnuts
of the Champs Elysees were budding snow still lingered
in the grass drives of Saint Desert and along the
ridges of the hills beyond the park. Sometimes,
as Undine looked out of the windows of the Boucher
gallery, she felt as if her eyes had never rested
on any other scene. Even her occasional brief
trips to Paris left no lasting trace: the life
of the vivid streets faded to a shadow as soon as
the black and white horizon of Saint Desert closed
in on her again.
Though the afternoons were still cold she had lately
taken to sitting in the gallery. The smiling
scenes on its walls and the tall screens which broke
its length made it more habitable than the drawing-rooms
beyond; but her chief reason for preferring it was
the satisfaction she found in having fires lit in
both the monumental chimneys that faced each other
down its long perspective. This satisfaction had
its source in the old Marquise’s disapproval.
Never before in the history of Saint Desert had the
consumption of firewood exceeded a certain carefully-calculated
measure; but since Undine had been in authority this
allowance had been doubled. If any one had told
her, a year earlier, that one of the chief distractions
of her new life would be to invent ways of annoying
her mother-in-law, she would have laughed at the idea
of wasting her time on such trifles. But she
