He mentioned the sum and the fact that he must give an answer the next day.  Would she consent to sail that very Saturday?  Or should they go a fortnight later, in a slow boat from Plymouth?

Undine frowned on both alternatives.  She was an indifferent sailor and shrank from the possible “nastiness” of the cheaper boat.  She wanted to get the voyage over as quickly and luxuriously as possible—­Bertha Shallum had told her that in a “deck-suite” no one need be sea-sick—­but she wanted still more to have another week or two of Paris; and it was always hard to make her see why circumstances could not be bent to her wishes.

“This week?  But how on earth can I be ready?  Besides, we’re dining at Enghien with the Shallums on Saturday, and motoring to Chantilly with the Jim Driscolls on Sunday.  I can’t imagine how you thought we could go this week!”

But she still opposed the cheap steamer, and after they had carried the question on to Voisin’s, and there unprofitably discussed it through a long luncheon, it seemed no nearer a solution.

“Well, think it over—­let me know this evening,” Ralph said, proportioning the waiter’s fee to a bill burdened by Undine’s reckless choice of primeurs.

His wife was to join the newly-arrived Mrs. Shallum in a round of the rue de la Paix; and he had seized the opportunity of slipping off to a classical performance at the Francais.  On their arrival in Paris he had taken Undine to one of these entertainments, but it left her too weary and puzzled for him to renew the attempt, and he had not found time to go back without her.  He was glad now to shed his cares in such an atmosphere.  The play was of the greatest, the interpretation that of the vanishing grand manner which lived in his first memories of the Parisian stage, and his surrender such influences as complete as in his early days.  Caught up in the fiery chariot of art, he felt once more the tug of its coursers in his muscles, and the rush of their flight still throbbed in him when he walked back late to the hotel.

XIII

He had expected to find Undine still out; but on the stairs he crossed Mrs. Shallum, who threw at him from under an immense hat-brim:  “Yes, she’s in, but you’d better come and have tea with me at the Luxe.  I don’t think husbands are wanted!”

Ralph laughingly rejoined that that was just the moment for them to appear; and Mrs. Shallum swept on, crying back:  “All the same, I’ll wait for you!”

In the sitting-room Ralph found Undine seated behind a tea-table on the other side of which, in an attitude of easy intimacy, Peter Van Degen stretched his lounging length.