Chapter 41

The incident left Undine with the baffled feeling of not being able to
count on any of her old weapons of aggression. In all her struggles for
authority her sense of the rightfulness of her cause had been measured
by her power of making people do as she pleased. Raymond's firmness
shook her faith in her own claims, and a blind desire to wound and
destroy replaced her usual business-like intentness on gaining her
end. But her ironies were as ineffectual as her arguments, and his
imperviousness was the more exasperating because she divined that some
of the things she said would have hurt him if any one else had said
them: it was the fact of their coming from her that made them innocuous.
Even when, at the close of their talk, she had burst out: "If you grudge
me everything I care about we'd better separate," he had merely answered
with a shrug: "It's one of the things we don't do--" and the answer had
been like the slamming of an iron door in her face.

An interval of silent brooding had resulted in a reaction of rebellion.
She dared not carry out her threat of joining her compatriots at the
Nouveau Luxe: she had too clear a memory of the results of her former
revolt. But neither could she submit to her present fate without
attempting to make Raymond understand his selfish folly. She had failed
to prove it by argument, but she had an inherited faith in the value of
practical demonstration. If he could be made to see how easily he could
give her what she wanted perhaps he might come round to her view.

With this idea in mind, she had gone up to Paris for twenty-four hours,
on the pretext of finding a new nurse for Paul; and the steps then taken
had enabled her, on the first occasion, to set her plan in motion. The
occasion was furnished by Raymond's next trip to Beaune. He went off
early one morning, leaving word that he should not be back till night;
and on the afternoon of the same day she stood at her usual post in the
gallery, scanning the long perspective of the poplar avenue.

She had not stood there long before a black speck at the end of the
avenue expanded into a motor that was presently throbbing at the
entrance. Undine, at its approach, turned from the window, and as she
moved down the gallery her glance rested on the great tapestries, with
their ineffable minglings of blue and rose, as complacently as though
they had been mirrors reflecting her own image.

She was still looking at them when the door opened and a servant ushered
in a small swarthy man who, in spite of his conspicuously London-made
clothes, had an odd exotic air, as if he had worn rings in his ears or
left a bale of spices at the door.

He bowed to Undine, cast a rapid eye up and down the room, and