“You’ve been gone forever. Was it the Adelschein who made you go such lengths?” he asked her, trying to keep to his usual joking tone.
Undine, as she dropped down on the sofa and unpinned her hat, shed on him the light of her guileless gaze.
“I don’t know: everybody was amusing. The Marquis is awfully bright.”
“I’d no idea you or Bertha Shallum knew Madame Adelschein well enough to take her off with you in that way.”
Undine sat absently smoothing the tuft of glossy cock’s-feathers in her hat.
“I don’t see that you’ve got to know people particularly well to go for a walk with them. The Baroness is awfully bright too.”
She always gave her acquaintances their titles, seeming not, in this respect, to have noticed that a simpler form prevailed.
“I don’t dispute the interest of what she says; but I’ve told you what decent people think of what she does,” Ralph retorted, exasperated by what seemed a wilful pretense of ignorance.
She continued to scrutinize him with her clear eyes, in which there was no shadow of offense.
“You mean they don’t want to go round with her? You’re mistaken: it’s not true. She goes round with everybody. She dined last night with the Grand Duchess; Roviano told me so.”
This was not calculated to make Ralph take a more tolerant view of the question.
“Does he also tell you what’s said of her?”
“What’s said of her?” Undine’s limpid glance rebuked him. “Do you mean that disgusting scandal you told me about? Do you suppose I’d let him talk to me about such things? I meant you’re mistaken about her social position. He says she goes everywhere.”
Ralph laughed impatiently. “No doubt Roviano’s an authority; but it doesn’t happen to be his business to choose your friends for you.”
Undine echoed his laugh. “Well, I guess I don’t need anybody to do that: I can do it myself,” she said, with the good-humoured curtness that was the habitual note of intercourse with the Spraggs.
Ralph sat down beside her and laid a caressing touch on her shoulder. “No, you can’t, you foolish child. You know nothing of this society you’re in; of its antecedents, its rules, its conventions; and it’s my affair to look after you, and warn you when you’re on the wrong track.”
“Mercy, what a solemn speech!” She shrugged away his hand without ill-temper. “I don’t believe an American woman needs to know such a lot about their old rules. They can see I mean to follow my own, and if they don’t like it they needn’t go with me.”
“Oh, they’ll go with you fast enough, as you call it. They’ll be too charmed to. The question is how far they’ll make you go with THEM, and where they’ll finally land you.”
She tossed her head back with the movement she had learned in “speaking” school-pieces about freedom and the British tyrant.
“No one’s ever yet gone any farther with me than I wanted!” she declared. She was really exquisitely simple.
“I’m not sure Roviano hasn’t, in vouching for Madame Adelschein. But he probably thinks you know about her. To him this isn’t ‘society’ any more than the people in an omnibus are. Society, to everybody here, means the sanction of their own special group and of the corresponding groups elsewhere. The Adelschein goes about in a place like this because it’s nobody’s business to stop her; but the women who tolerate her here would drop her like a shot if she set foot on their own ground.”
The thoughtful air with which Undine heard him out made him fancy this argument had carried; and as be ended she threw him a bright look.
“Well, that’s easy enough: I can drop her if she comes to New York.”
Ralph sat silent for a moment—then he turned away and began to gather up his scattered pages.
Undine, in the ensuing days, was no less often with Madame Adelschein, and Ralph suspected a challenge in her open frequentation of the lady. But if challenge there were, he let it lie. Whether his wife saw more or less of Madame Adelschein seemed no longer of much consequence: she had so amply shown him her ability to protect herself. The pang lay in the completeness of the proof—in the perfect functioning of her instinct of self-preservation. For the first time he was face to face with his hovering dread: he was judging where he still adored.
Before long more pressing cares absorbed him. He had already begun to watch the post for his father-in-law’s monthly remittance, without precisely knowing how, even with its aid, he was to bridge the gulf of expense between St. Moritz and New York. The non-arrival of Mr. Spragg’s cheque was productive of graver tears, and these were abruptly confirmed when, coming in one afternoon, he found Undine crying over a letter from her mother.
Her distress made him fear that Mr. Spragg was ill, and he drew her to him soothingly; but she broke away with an impatient movement.
“Oh, they’re all well enough—but father’s lost a lot of money. He’s been speculating, and he can’t send us anything for at least three months.”
Ralph murmured reassuringly: “As long as there’s no one ill!”—but in reality he was following her despairing gaze down the long perspective of their barren quarter.
“Three months! Three months!”
Undine dried her eyes, and sat with set lips and tapping foot while he read her mother’s letter.
“Your poor father! It’s a hard knock for him. I’m sorry,” he said as he handed it back.
For a moment she did not seem to hear; then she said between her teeth: “It’s hard for US. I suppose now we’ll have to go straight home.”
He looked at her with wonder. “If that were all! In any case I should have to be back in a few weeks.”
“But we needn’t have left here in August! It’s the first place in Europe that I’ve liked, and it’s just my luck to be dragged away from it!”
“I’m so awfully sorry, dearest. It’s my fault for persuading you to marry a pauper.”
“It’s father’s fault. Why on earth did he go and speculate? There’s no use his saying he’s sorry now!” She sat brooding for a moment and then suddenly took Ralph’s hand. “Couldn’t your people do something—help us out just this once, I mean?”
He flushed to the forehead: it seemed inconceivable that she should make such a suggestion.
“I couldn’t ask them—it’s not possible. My grandfather does as much as he can for me, and my mother has nothing but what he gives her.”
Undine seemed unconscious of his embarrassment. “He doesn’t give us nearly as much as father does,” she said; and, as Ralph remained silent, she went on:
“Couldn’t you ask your sister, then? I must have some clothes to go home in.”
His heart contracted as he looked at her. What sinister change came over her when her will was crossed? She seemed to grow inaccessible, implacable—her eyes were like the eyes of an enemy.
“I don’t know—I’ll see,” he said, rising and moving away from her. At that moment the touch of her hand was repugnant. Yes—he might ask Laura, no doubt: and whatever she had would be his. But the necessity was bitter to him, and Undine’s unconsciousness of the fact hurt him more than her indifference to her father’s misfortune.
What hurt him most was the curious fact that, for all her light irresponsibility, it was always she who made the practical suggestion, hit the nail of expediency on the head. No sentimental scruple made the blow waver or deflected her resolute aim. She had thought at once of Laura, and Laura was his only, his inevitable, resource. His anxious mind pictured his sister’s wonder, and made him wince under the sting of Henley Fairford’s irony: Fairford, who at the time of the marriage had sat silent and pulled his moustache while every one else argued and objected, yet under whose silence Ralph had felt a deeper protest than under all the reasoning of the others. It was no comfort to reflect that Fairford would probably continue to say nothing! But necessity made light of these twinges, and Ralph set his teeth and cabled.