calculated as the happiest Wall Street “stroke.”  She had gone away with Peter because, after the decisive scene in which she had put her power to the test, to yield to him seemed the surest means of victory.  Even to her practical intelligence it was clear that an immediate dash to Dakota might look too calculated; and she had preserved her self-respect by telling herself that she was really his wife, and in no way to blame if the law delayed to ratify the bond.  She was still persuaded of the justness of her reasoning; but she now saw that it had left certain risks out of account.  Her life with Van Degen had taught her many things.  The two had wandered from place to place, spending a great deal of money, always more and more money; for the first time in her life she had been able to buy everything she wanted.  For a while this had kept her amused and busy; but presently she began to perceive that her companion’s view of their relation was not the same as hers.  She saw that he had always meant it to be an unavowed tie, screened by Mrs. Shallum’s companionship and Clare’s careless tolerance; and that on those terms he would have been ready to shed on their adventure the brightest blaze of notoriety.  But since Undine had insisted on being carried off like a sentimental school-girl he meant to shroud the affair in mystery, and was as zealous in concealing their relation as she was bent on proclaiming it.  In the “powerful” novels which Popple was fond of lending her she had met with increasing frequency the type of heroine who scorns to love clandestinely, and proclaims the sanctity of passion and the moral duty of obeying its call.  Undine had been struck by these arguments as justifying and even ennobling her course, and had let Peter understand that she had been actuated by the highest motives in openly associating her life with his; but he had opposed a placid insensibility to these allusions, and had persisted in treating her as though their journey were the kind of escapade that a man of the world is bound to hide.  She had expected him to take her to all the showy places where couples like themselves are relieved from a too sustained contemplation of nature by the distractions of the restaurant and the gaming-table; but he had carried her from one obscure corner of Europe to another, shunning fashionable hotels and crowded watering-places, and displaying an ingenuity in the discovery of the unvisited and the out-of-season that gave their journey an odd resemblance to her melancholy wedding-tour.

She had never for a moment ceased to remember that the Dakota divorce-court was the objective point of this later honeymoon, and her allusions to the fact were as frequent as prudence permitted.  Peter seemed in no way disturbed by them.  He responded with expressions of increasing tenderness, or the purchase of another piece of jewelry; and though Undine could not remember his ever voluntarily bringing the subject of their marriage he did not shrink from her