She shook her head.  “I don’t believe she could afford it, even if I could persuade her to leave father.  You know father hasn’t done very well lately:  I shouldn’t like to ask him for the money.”

“You’re so confoundedly proud!” He was edging nearer.  “It would all be so easy if you’d only be a little fond of me...”

She froze to her sofa-end.  “We women can’t repair our mistakes.  Don’t make me more miserable by reminding me of mine.”

“Oh, nonsense!  There’s nothing cash won’t do.  Why won’t you let me straighten things out for you?”

Her colour rose again, and she looked him quickly and consciously in the eye.  It was time to play her last card.  “You seem to forget that I am—­married,” she said.

Van Degen was silent—­for a moment she thought he was swaying to her in the flush of surrender.  But he remained doggedly seated, meeting her look with an odd clearing of his heated gaze, as if a shrewd businessman had suddenly replaced the pining gentleman at the window.

“Hang it—­so am I!” he rejoined; and Undine saw that in the last issue he was still the stronger of the two.

XVII

Nothing was bitterer to her than to confess to herself the failure of her power; but her last talk with Van Degen had taught her a lesson almost worth the abasement.  She saw the mistake she had made in taking money from him, and understood that if she drifted into repeating that mistake her future would be irretrievably compromised.  What she wanted was not a hand-to-mouth existence of precarious intrigue:  to one with her gifts the privileges of life should come openly.  Already in her short experience she had seen enough of the women who sacrifice future security for immediate success, and she meant to lay solid foundations before she began to build up the light super-structure of enjoyment.

Nevertheless it was galling to see Van Degen leave, and to know that for the time he had broken away from her.  Over a nature so insensible to the spells of memory, the visible and tangible would always prevail.  If she could have been with him again in Paris, where, in the shining spring days, every sight and sound ministered to such influences, she was sure she could have regained her hold.  And the sense of frustration was intensified by the fact that every one she knew was to be there:  her potential rivals were crowding the east-bound steamers.  New York was a desert, and Ralph’s seeming unconsciousness of the fact increased her resentment.  She had had but one chance at Europe since her marriage, and that had been wasted through her husband’s unaccountable perversity.  She knew now with what packed hours of Paris and London they had paid for their empty weeks in Italy.