bachelor lodging.  The rest of the fine old mouldering house—­the tall-windowed premier on the garden, and the whole of the floor above—­had been let for years to old fashioned tenants who would have been more surprised than their landlord had he suddenly proposed to dispossess them.  Undine, at first, had regarded these arrangements as merely provisional.  She was persuaded that, under her influence, Raymond would soon convert his parents to more modern ideas, and meanwhile she was still in the flush of a completer well-being than she had ever known, and disposed, for the moment, to make light of any inconveniences connected with it.  The three months since her marriage had been more nearly like what she had dreamed of than any of her previous experiments in happiness.  At last she had what she wanted, and for the first time the glow of triumph was warmed by a deeper feeling.  Her husband was really charming (it was odd how he reminded her of Ralph!), and after her bitter two years of loneliness and humiliation it was delicious to find herself once more adored and protected.

The very fact that Raymond was more jealous of her than Ralph had ever been—­or at any rate less reluctant to show it—­gave her a keener sense of recovered power.  None of the men who had been in love with her before had been so frankly possessive, or so eager for reciprocal assurances of constancy.  She knew that Ralph had suffered deeply from her intimacy with Van Degen, but he had betrayed his feeling only by a more studied detachment; and Van Degen, from the first, had been contemptuously indifferent to what she did or felt when she was out of his sight.  As to her earlier experiences, she had frankly forgotten them:  her sentimental memories went back no farther than the beginning of her New York career.

Raymond seemed to attach more importance to love, in all its manifestations, than was usual or convenient in a husband; and she gradually began to be aware that her domination over him involved a corresponding loss of independence.  Since their return to Paris she had found that she was expected to give a circumstantial report of every hour she spent away from him.  She had nothing to hide, and no designs against his peace of mind except those connected with her frequent and costly sessions at the dress-makers’; but she had never before been called upon to account to any one for the use of her time, and after the first amused surprise at Raymond’s always wanting to know where she had been and whom she had seen she began to be oppressed by so exacting a devotion.  Her parents, from her tenderest youth, had tacitly recognized her inalienable right to “go round,” and Ralph—­though from motives which she divined to be different—­had shown the same respect for her freedom.  It was therefore disconcerting to find that Raymond expected her to choose her friends, and even her acquaintances, in conformity not only with his personal tastes but with a definite and complicated code of family prejudices and traditions; and she was especially surprised to discover that he viewed with disapproval her intimacy with the Princess Estradina.