“If there’s anything she wants to say to me, I don’t,” Undine answered, leaning back among her rosy pillows, and reflecting compassionately that the face opposite her was just the colour of the café au lait she was pouring out.
“There are things that are…that might seem too pointed…if one said them one’s self,” Madame de Trezac continued. “Our dear Lili’s so good-natured… she so hates to do anything unfriendly; but she naturally thinks first of her mother…”
“Her mother? What’s the matter with her mother?”
“I told her I knew you didn’t understand. I was sure you’d take it in good part…”
Undine raised herself on her elbow. “What did Lili tell you to tell me?”
“Oh, not to TELL you…simply to ask if, just for the present, you’d mind avoiding the Duchess’s Thursdays …calling on any other day, that is.”
“Any other day? She’s not at home on any other. Do you mean she doesn’t want me to call?”
“Well—not while the Marquise de Chelles is in Paris. She’s the Duchess’s favourite niece—and of course they all hang together. That kind of family feeling is something you naturally don’t—”
Undine had a sudden glimpse of hidden intricacies.
“That was Raymond de Chelles’ mother I saw there yesterday? The one they hurried out when I came in?”
“It seems she was very much upset. She somehow heard your name.”
“Why shouldn’t she have heard my name? And why in the world should it upset her?”
Madame de Trezac heaved a hesitating sigh. “Isn’t it better to be frank? She thinks she has reason to feel badly—they all do.”
“To feel badly? Because her son wants to marry me?”
“Of course they know that’s impossible.” Madame de Trezac smiled compassionately. “But they’re afraid of your spoiling his other chances.”
Undine paused a moment before answering, “It won’t be impossible when my marriage is annulled,” she said.
The effect of this statement was less electrifying than she had hoped. Her visitor simply broke into a laugh. “My dear child! Your marriage annulled? Who can have put such a mad idea into your head?”
Undine’s gaze followed the pattern she was tracing with a lustrous nail on her embroidered bedspread. “Raymond himself,” she let fall.
This time there was no mistaking the effect she produced. Madame de Trezac, with a murmured “Oh,” sat gazing before her as if she had lost the thread of her argument; and it was only after a considerable interval that she recovered it sufficiently to exclaim: “They’ll never hear of it—absolutely never!”
“But they can’t prevent it, can they?”
“They can prevent its being of any use to you.”
“I see,” Undine pensively assented.
She knew the tone she had taken was virtually a declaration of war; but she was in a mood when the act of defiance, apart from its strategic value, was a satisfaction in itself. Moreover, if she could not gain her end without a fight it was better that the battle should be engaged while Raymond’s ardour was at its height. To provoke immediate hostilities she sent for him the same afternoon, and related, quietly and without comment, the incident of her visit to the Duchess, and the mission with which Madame de Trezac had been charged. In the circumstances, she went on to explain, it was manifestly impossible that she should continue to receive his visits; and she met his wrathful comments on his relatives by the gently but firmly expressed resolve not to be the cause of any disagreement between himself and his family.
XXX
A few days after her decisive conversation with Raymond de Chelles, Undine, emerging from the doors of the Nouveau Luxe, where she had been to call on the newly-arrived Mrs. Homer Branney, once more found herself face to face with Elmer Moffatt.
This time there was no mistaking his eagerness to be recognized. He stopped short as they met, and she read such pleasure in his eyes that she too stopped, holding out her hand.
“I’m glad you’re going to speak to me,” she said, and Moffatt reddened at the allusion.
“Well, I very nearly didn’t. I didn’t know you. You look about as old as you did when I first landed at Apex—remember?”
He turned back and began to walk at her side in the direction of the Champs Elysees.
“Say—this is all right!” he exclaimed; and she saw that his glance had left her and was ranging across the wide silvery square ahead of them to the congregated domes and spires beyond the river.
“Do you like Paris?” she asked, wondering what theatres he had been to.
“It beats everything.” He seemed to be breathing in deeply the impression of fountains, sculpture, leafy’ avenues and long-drawn architectural distances fading into the afternoon haze.
“I suppose you’ve been to that old church over there?” he went on, his gold-topped stick pointing toward the towers of Notre Dame.
“Oh, of course; when I used to sightsee. Have you never been to Paris before?”
“No, this is my first look-round. I came across in March.”
“In March?” she echoed inattentively. It never occurred to her that other people’s lives went on when they were out of her range of vision, and she tried in vain to remember what she had last heard of Moffatt. “Wasn’t that a bad time to leave Wall Street?”
“Well, so-so. Fact is, I was played out: needed a change.” Nothing in his robust mien confirmed the statement, and he did not seem inclined to develop it. “I presume you’re settled here now?” he went on. “I saw by the papers—”
“Yes,” she interrupted; adding, after a moment: “It was all a mistake from the first.”
“Well, I never thought he was your form,” said Moffatt.
His eyes had come back to her, and the look in them struck her as something she might use to her advantage; but the next moment he had glanced away with a furrowed brow, and she felt she had not wholly fixed his attention.
“I live at the other end of Paris. Why not come back and have tea with me?” she suggested, half moved by a desire to know more of his affairs, and half by the thought that a talk with him might help to shed some light on hers.
In the open taxi-cab he seemed to recover his sense of well-being, and leaned back, his hands on the knob of his stick, with the air of a man pleasantly aware of his privileges. “This Paris is a thundering good place,” he repeated once or twice as they rolled on through the crush and glitter of the afternoon; and when they had descended at Undine’s door, and he stood in her drawingroom, and looked out on the horse-chestnut trees rounding their green domes under the balcony, his satisfaction culminated in the comment: “I guess this lays
