Chapter 13

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.

He did not move on Ralph's appearance, no doubt thinking their kinship
close enough to make his nod and "Hullo!" a sufficient greeting. Peter
in intimacy was given to miscalculations of the sort, and Ralph's first
movement was to glance at Undine and see how it affected her. But her
eyes gave out the vivid rays that noise and banter always struck from
them; her face, at such moments, was like a theatre with all the lustres
blazing. That the illumination should have been kindled by his cousin's
husband was not precisely agreeable to Marvell, who thought Peter a bore
in society and an insufferable nuisance on closer terms. But he was
becoming blunted to Undine's lack of discrimination; and his own
treatment of Van Degen was always tempered by his sympathy for Clare.

He therefore listened with apparent good-humour to Peter's suggestion of
an evening at a petit theatre with the Harvey Shallums, and joined in
the laugh with which Undine declared: "Oh, Ralph won't go--he only
likes the theatres where they walk around in bathtowels and talk
poetry.--Isn't that what you've just been seeing?" she added, with a
turn of the neck that shed her brightness on him.

"What? One of those five-barrelled shows at the Français? Great Scott,
Ralph--no wonder your wife's pining for the Folies Bergère!"

"She needn't, my dear fellow. We never interfere with each other's
vices."

Peter, unsolicited, was comfortably lighting a cigarette. "Ah, there's
the secret of domestic happiness. Marry somebody who likes all the
things you don't, and make love to somebody who likes all the things you
do."

Undine laughed appreciatively. "Only it dooms poor Ralph to such awful
frumps. Can't you see the sort of woman who'd love his sort of play?"

"Oh, I can see her fast enough--my wife loves 'em," said their visitor,
rising with a grin; while Ralph threw, out: "So don't waste your pity on
me!" and Undine's laugh had the slight note of asperity that the mention
of Clare always elicited.

"To-morrow night, then, at