Chapter 20

Some six weeks later. Undine Marvell stood at the window smiling down on
her recovered Paris.

Her hotel sitting-room had, as usual, been flowered, cushioned and
lamp-shaded into a delusive semblance of stability; and she had really
felt, for the last few weeks, that the life she was leading there must
be going to last--it seemed so perfect an answer to all her wants!

As she looked out at the thronged street, on which the summer light lay
like a blush of pleasure, she felt herself naturally akin to all the
bright and careless freedom of the scene. She had been away from
Paris for two days, and the spectacle before her seemed more rich and
suggestive after her brief absence from it. Her senses luxuriated in all
its material details: the thronging motors, the brilliant shops, the
novelty and daring of the women's dresses, the piled-up colours of
the ambulant flower-carts, the appetizing expanse of the fruiterers'
windows, even the chromatic effects of the petits fours behind the
plate-glass of the pastry-cooks: all the surface-sparkle and variety of
the inexhaustible streets of Paris.

The scene before her typified to Undine her first real taste of life.
How meagre and starved the past appeared in comparison with this
abundant present! The noise, the crowd, the promiscuity beneath her eyes
symbolized the glare and movement of her life. Every moment of her days
was packed with excitement and exhilaration. Everything amused her: the
long hours of bargaining and debate with dress-makers and jewellers, the
crowded lunches at fashionable restaurants, the perfunctory dash through
a picture-show or the lingering visit to the last new milliner; the
afternoon motor-rush to some leafy suburb, where tea and musics and
sunset were hastily absorbed on a crowded terrace above the Seine; the
whirl home through the Bois to dress for dinner and start again on the
round of evening diversions; the dinner at the Nouveau Luxe or the
Café de Paris, and the little play at the Capucines or the Variétés,
followed, because the night was "too lovely," and it was a shame to
waste it, by a breathless flight back to the Bois, with supper in one
of its lamp-hung restaurants, or, if the weather forbade, a tumultuous
progress through the midnight haunts where "ladies" were not supposed
to show themselves, and might consequently taste the thrill of being
occasionally taken for their opposites.

As the varied vision unrolled itself, Undine contrasted it with the pale
monotony of her previous summers. The one she most resented was the
first after her marriage, the European summer out of whose joys she had
been cheated by her own ignorance and Ralph's perversity. They had been
free then,