This fit of retrospection had been provoked by two letters which had come that morning.  One was from Ralph, who began by reminding her that he had not heard from her for weeks, and went on to point out, in his usual tone of good-humoured remonstrance, that since her departure the drain on her letter of credit had been deep and constant.  “I wanted you,” he wrote, “to get all the fun you could out of the money I made last spring; but I didn’t think you’d get through it quite so fast.  Try to come home without leaving too many bills behind you.  Your illness and Paul’s cost more than I expected, and Lipscomb has had a bad knock in Wall Street, and hasn’t yet paid his first quarter...”

Always the same monotonous refrain!  Was it her fault that she and the boy had been ill?  Or that Harry Lipscomb had been “on the wrong side” of Wall Street?  Ralph seemed to have money on the brain:  his business life had certainly deteriorated him.  And, since he hadn’t made a success of it after all, why shouldn’t he turn back to literature and try to write his novel?  Undine, the previous winter, had been dazzled by the figures which a well-known magazine editor, whom she had met at dinner had named as within reach of the successful novelist.  She perceived for the first time that literature was becoming fashionable, and instantly decided that it would be amusing and original if she and Ralph should owe their prosperity to his talent.  She already saw herself, as the wife of a celebrated author, wearing “artistic” dresses and doing the drawing-room over with Gothic tapestries and dim lights in altar candle-sticks.  But when she suggested Ralph’s taking up his novel he answered with a laugh that his brains were sold to the firm—­that when he came back at night the tank was empty...And now he wanted her to sail for home in a week!

The other letter excited a deeper resentment.  It was an appeal from Laura Fairford to return and look after Ralph.  He was overworked and out of spirits, she wrote, and his mother and sister, reluctant as they were to interfere, felt they ought to urge Undine to come back to him.  Details followed, unwelcome and officious.  What right had Laura Fairford to preach to her of wifely obligations?  No doubt Charles Bowen had sent home a highly-coloured report—­and there was really a certain irony in Mrs. Fairford’s criticizing her sister-in-law’s conduct on information obtained from such a source!  Undine turned from the window and threw herself down on her deeply cushioned sofa.  She was feeling the pleasant fatigue consequent on her trip to the country, whither she and Mrs. Shallum had gone with Raymond de Chelles to spend a night at the old Marquis’s chateau.  When her travelling companions, an hour earlier, had left her at her door, she had half-promised to rejoin them for a late dinner in the Bois; and as she leaned back among the cushions disturbing thoughts were banished by the urgent necessity of deciding what dress she should wear.