found herself with a great deal of time to waste, and with a fierce desire to spend it in upsetting the immemorial customs of Saint Desert.  Her husband had mastered her in essentials, but she had discovered innumerable small ways of irritating and hurting him, and one—­and not the least effectual—­was to do anything that went counter to his mother’s prejudices.  It was not that he always shared her views, or was a particularly subservient son; but it seemed to be one of his fundamental principles that a man should respect his mother’s wishes, and see to it that his household respected them.  All Frenchmen of his class appeared to share this view, and to regard it as beyond discussion:  it was based on something so much more Immutable than personal feeling that one might even hate one’s mother and yet insist that her ideas as to the consumption of fire-wood should be regarded.

The old Marquise, during the cold weather, always sat in her bedroom; and there, between the tapestried four-poster and the fireplace, the family grouped itself around the ground-glass of her single carcel lamp.  In the evening, if there were visitors, a fire was lit in the library; otherwise the family again sat about the Marquise’s lamp till the footman came in at ten with tisane and biscuits de Reims; after which every one bade the dowager good night and scattered down the corridors to chill distances marked by tapers floating in cups of oil.

Since Undine’s coming the library fire had never been allowed to go out; and of late, after experimenting with the two drawing-rooms and the so-called “study” where Raymond kept his guns and saw the bailiff, she had selected the gallery as the most suitable place for the new and unfamiliar ceremony of afternoon tea.  Afternoon refreshments had never before been served at Saint Desert except when company was expected; when they had invariably consisted in a decanter of sweet port and a plate of small dry cakes—­the kind that kept.  That the complicated rites of the tea-urn, with its offering-up of perishable delicacies, should be enacted for the sole enjoyment of the family, was a thing so unheard of that for a while Undine found sufficient amusement in elaborating the ceremonial, and in making the ancestral plate groan under more varied viands; and when this palled she devised the plan of performing the office in the gallery and lighting sacrificial fires in both chimneys.

She had said to Raymond, at first:  “It’s ridiculous that your mother should sit in her bedroom all day.  She says she does it to save fires; but if we have a fire downstairs why can’t she let hers go out, and come down?  I don’t see why I should spend my life in your mother’s bedroom.”

Raymond made no answer, and the Marquise did, in fact, let her fire go out.  But she did not come down—­she simply continued to sit upstairs without a fire.