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.
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.
