“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 arm-chairs.”
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.
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 had failed to prove it
by argument, but she had an inherited faith in the
value of practical demonstration. If he could
be made to see how easily he could give her what she
wanted perhaps he might come round to her view.
With this idea in mind, she had gone up to Paris for
twenty-four hours, on the pretext of finding a new
nurse for Paul; and the steps then taken had enabled
her, on the first occasion, to set her plan in motion.
The occasion was furnished by Raymond’s next
trip to Beaune. He went off early one morning,
leaving word that he should not be back till night;
and on the afternoon of the same day she stood at her
usual post in the gallery, scanning the long perspective
of the poplar avenue.
