Chapter 43

She watched him go in a kind of stupour, knowing that when they next met
he would be as courteous and self-possessed as if nothing had happened,
but that everything would nevertheless go on in the same way--in HIS
way--and that there was no more hope of shaking his resolve or altering
his point of view than there would have been of transporting the
deep-rooted masonry of Saint Desert by means of the wheeled supports on
which Apex architecture performed its easy transits.

One of her childish rages possessed her, sweeping away every feeling
save the primitive impulse to hurt and destroy; but search as she would
she could not find a crack in the strong armour of her husband's habits
and prejudices. For a long time she continued to sit where he had left
her, staring at the portraits on the walls as though they had joined
hands to imprison her. Hitherto she had almost always felt herself a
match for circumstances, but now the very dead were leagued to defeat
her: people she had never seen and whose names she couldn't even
remember seemed to be plotting and contriving against her under the
escutcheoned grave-stones of Saint Desert.

Her eyes turned to the old warm-toned furniture beneath the pictures,
and to her own idle image in the mirror above the mantelpiece. Even in
that one small room there were enough things of price to buy a release
from her most pressing cares; and the great house, in which the room was
a mere cell, and the other greater house in Burgundy, held treasures to
deplete even such a purse as Moffatt's. She liked to see such things
about her--without any real sense of their meaning she felt them to be
the appropriate setting of a pretty woman, to embody something of the
rareness and distinction she had always considered she possessed; and
she reflected that if she had still been Moffatt's wife he would have
given her just such a setting, and the power to live in it as became
her.

The thought sent her memory flying back to things she had turned it from
for years. For the first time since their far-off weeks together she let
herself relive the brief adventure. She had been drawn to Elmer Moffatt
from the first--from the day when Ben Frusk, Indiana's brother, had
brought him to a church picnic at Mulvey's Grove, and he had taken
instant possession of Undine, sitting in the big "stage" beside her on
the "ride" to the grove, supplanting Millard Binch (to whom she was
still, though intermittently and incompletely, engaged), swinging her
between the trees, rowing her on the lake, catching and kissing her
in "forfeits," awarding her the first prize in the Beauty Show he
hilariously organized and gallantly carried out, and finally (no one
knew how) contriving to