Chapter 42 - Page 2

I mean--" Madame de Trezac took the plunge. "It's not
a question of your being bored."

Undine coloured; but she could take the hardest thrusts where her
personal interest was involved. "You mean that I'M the bore, then?"

"Well, you don't work hard enough--you don't keep up. It's not that they
don't admire you--your looks, I mean; they think you beautiful; they're
delighted to bring you out at their big dinners, with the Sevres and the
plate. But a woman has got to be something more than good-looking to
have a chance to be intimate with them: she's got to know what's being
said about things. I watched you the other night at the Duchess's, and
half the time you hadn't an idea what they were talking about. I haven't
always, either; but then I have to put up with the big dinners."

Undine winced under the criticism; but she had never lacked insight into
the cause of her own failures, and she had already had premonitions of
what Madame de Trezac so bluntly phrased. When Raymond ceased to be
interested in her conversation she had concluded it was the way of
husbands; but since then it had been slowly dawning on her that she
produced the same effect on others. Her entrances were always triumphs;
but they had no sequel. As soon as people began to talk they ceased to
see her. Any sense of insufficiency exasperated her, and she had vague
thoughts of cultivating herself, and went so far as to spend a
morning in the Louvre and go to one or two lectures by a fashionable
philosopher. But though she returned from these expeditions charged with
opinions, their expression did not excite the interest she had hoped.
Her views, if abundant, were confused, and the more she said the more
nebulous they seemed to grow. She was disconcerted, moreover, by finding
that everybody appeared to know about the things she thought she had
discovered, and her comments clearly produced more bewilderment than
interest.

Remembering the attention she had attracted on her first appearance in
Raymond's world she concluded that she had "gone off" or grown dowdy,
and instead of wasting more time in museums and lecture-halls she
prolonged her hours at the dress-maker's and gave up the rest of the day
to the scientific cultivation of her beauty.

"I suppose I've turned into a perfect frump down there in that
wilderness," she lamented to Madame de Trezac, who replied inexorably:
"Oh, no, you're as handsome as ever; but people here don't go on looking
at each other forever as they do in London."

Meanwhile financial cares became more pressing. A dunning letter from
one of her tradesmen fell into Raymond's hands, and the talk it led to
ended in his making it clear