Chapter 39

Undine did not fulfil her threat. The month of May saw her back in the
rooms she had declared she would never set foot in, and after her long
sojourn among the echoing vistas of Saint Desert the exiguity of her
Paris quarters seemed like cosiness.

In the interval many things had happened. Hubert, permitted by his
anxious relatives to anticipate the term of the family mourning, had
been showily and expensively united to his heiress; the Hotel de Chelles
had been piped, heated and illuminated in accordance with the bride's
requirements; and the young couple, not content with these utilitarian
changes had moved doors, opened windows, torn down partitions, and given
over the great trophied and pilastered dining-room to a decorative
painter with a new theory of the human anatomy. Undine had silently
assisted at this spectacle, and at the sight of the old Marquise's
abject acquiescence; she had seen the Duchesse de Dordogne and the
Princesse Estradina go past her door to visit Hubert's premier and
marvel at the American bath-tubs and the Annamite bric-a-brac; and she
had been present, with her husband, at the banquet at which Hubert had
revealed to the astonished Faubourg the prehistoric episodes depicted on
his dining-room walls. She had accepted all these necessities with the
stoicism which the last months had developed in her; for more and more,
as the days passed, she felt herself in the grasp of circumstances
stronger than any effort she could oppose to them. The very absence
of external pressure, of any tactless assertion of authority on her
husband's part, intensified the sense of her helplessness. He simply
left it to her to infer that, important as she might be to him in
certain ways, there were others in which she did not weigh a feather.

Their outward relations had not changed since her outburst on the
subject of Hubert's marriage. That incident had left her half-ashamed,
half-frightened at her behaviour, and she had tried to atone for it
by the indirect arts that were her nearest approach to acknowledging
herself in the wrong. Raymond met her advances with a good grace,
and they lived through the rest of the winter on terms of apparent
understanding. When the spring approached it was he who suggested that,
since his mother had consented to Hubert's marrying before the year of
mourning was over, there was really no reason why they should not go up
to Paris as usual; and she was surprised at the readiness with which he
prepared to accompany her.

A year earlier she would have regarded this as another proof of her
power; but she now drew her inferences less quickly. Raymond was as
"lovely" to her as ever; but more than once, during their months in the
country, she had had a startled