Chapter 37 - Page 2

was somewhat dismayed to find that she was expected to fit the
boy and his nurse into a corner of her contracted entresol. But the
possibility of a mother's not finding room for her son, however cramped
her own quarters, seemed not to have occurred to her new relations, and
the preparing of her dressing-room and boudoir for Paul's occupancy was
carried on by the household with a zeal which obliged her to dissemble
her lukewarmness.

Undine had supposed that on her marriage one of the great suites of
the Hotel de Chelles would be emptied of its tenants and put at her
husband's disposal; but she had since learned that, even had such a plan
occurred to her parents-in-law, considerations of economy would have
hindered it. The old Marquis and his wife, who were content, when they
came up from Burgundy in the spring, with a modest set of rooms looking
out on the court of their ancestral residence, expected their son and
his wife to fit themselves into the still smaller apartment which
had served as Raymond's bachelor lodging. The rest of the fine old
mouldering house--the tall-windowed premier on the garden, and the whole
of the floor above--had been let for years to old fashioned tenants
who would have been more surprised than their landlord had he suddenly
proposed to dispossess them. Undine, at first, had regarded these
arrangements as merely provisional. She was persuaded that, under her
influence, Raymond would soon convert his parents to more modern ideas,
and meanwhile she was still in the flush of a completer well-being than
she had ever known, and disposed, for the moment, to make light of any
inconveniences connected with it. The three months since her marriage
had been more nearly like what she had dreamed of than any of her
previous experiments in happiness. At last she had what she wanted, and
for the first time the glow of triumph was warmed by a deeper feeling.
Her husband was really charming (it was odd how he reminded her of
Ralph!), and after her bitter two years of loneliness and humiliation it
was delicious to find herself once more adored and protected.

The very fact that Raymond was more jealous of her than Ralph had ever
been--or at any rate less reluctant to show it--gave her a keener sense
of recovered power. None of the men who had been in love with her before
had been so frankly possessive, or so eager for reciprocal assurances
of constancy. She knew that Ralph had suffered deeply from her intimacy
with Van Degen, but he had betrayed his feeling only by a more studied
detachment; and Van Degen, from the first, had been contemptuously
indifferent to what she did or felt when she was out of his sight. As to
her earlier experiences, she had frankly forgotten them: her sentimental