Her husband stood looking at her coldly and curiously,
as though she were some alien apparition his eyes
had never before beheld.
“Ah, that’s your answer—that’s
all you feel when you lay hands on things that are
sacred to us!” He stopped a moment, and then
let his voice break out with the volume she had felt
it to be gathering. “And you’re all
alike,” he exclaimed, “every one of you.
You come among us from a country we don’t know,
and can’t imagine, a country you care for so
little that before you’ve been a day in ours
you’ve forgotten the very house you were born
in—if it wasn’t torn down before you
knew it! You come among us speaking our language
and not knowing what we mean; wanting the things we
want, and not knowing why we want them; aping our
weaknesses, exaggerating our follies, ignoring or ridiculing
all we care about—you come from hotels
as big as towns, and from towns as flimsy as paper,
where the streets haven’t had time to be named,
and the buildings are demolished before they’re
dry, and the people are as proud of changing as we
are of holding to what we have—and we’re
fools enough to imagine that because you copy our
ways and pick up our slang you understand anything
about the things that make life decent and honourable
for us!”
He stopped again, his white face and drawn nostrils
giving him so much the look of an extremely distinguished
actor in a fine part that, in spite of the vehemence
of his emotion, his silence might have been the deliberate
pause for a replique. Undine kept him waiting
long enough to give the effect of having lost her
cue—then she brought out, with a little
soft stare of incredulity: “Do you mean
to say you’re going to refuse such an offer?”
“Ah—!” He turned back from the
door, and picking up the letter that lay on the table
between them, tore it in pieces and tossed the pieces
on the floor. “That’s how I refuse
it!”
The violence of his tone and gesture made her feel
as though the fluttering strips were so many lashes
laid across her face, and a rage that was half fear
possessed her.
“How dare you speak to me like that? Nobody’s
ever dared to before. Is talking to a woman in
that way one of the things you call decent and honourable?
Now that I know what you feel about me I don’t
want to stay in your house another day. And I
don’t mean to—I mean to walk out of
it this very hour!”
For a moment they stood face to face, the depths of
their mutual incomprehension at last bared to each
other’s angry eyes; then Raymond, his glance
travelling past her, pointed to the fragments of paper
on the floor.
“If you’re capable of that you’re
capable of anything!” he said as he went out
of the room.
XLIII
She watched him go in a kind of stupour, knowing that
when they next met he would be as courteous and self-possessed
as if nothing had happened, but that everything would
nevertheless go on in the same way—in his
way—and that there was no more hope of shaking
his resolve or altering his point of view than there
would have been of transporting the deep-rooted masonry
of Saint Desert by means of the wheeled supports on
which Apex architecture performed its easy transits.
