To faire valoir the family acres had always, it appeared, been Raymond’s deepest-seated purpose, and all his frivolities dropped from him with the prospect of putting his hand to the plough.  He was not, indeed, inhuman enough to condemn his wife to perpetual exile.  He meant, he assured her, that she should have her annual spring visit to Paris—­but he stared in dismay at her suggestion that they should take possession of the coveted premier of the Hotel de Chelles.  He was gallant enough to express the wish that it were in his power to house her on such a scale; but he could not conceal his surprise that she had ever seriously expected it.  She was beginning to see that he felt her constitutional inability to understand anything about money as the deepest difference between them.  It was a proficiency no one had ever expected her to acquire, and the lack of which she had even been encouraged to regard as a grace and to use as a pretext.  During the interval between her divorce and her remarriage she had learned what things cost, but not how to do without them; and money still seemed to her like some mysterious and uncertain stream which occasionally vanished underground but was sure to bubble up again at one’s feet.  Now, however, she found herself in a world where it represented not the means of individual gratification but the substance binding together whole groups of interests, and where the uses to which it might be put in twenty years were considered before the reasons for spending it on the spot.  At first she was sure she could laugh Raymond out of his prudence or coax him round to her point of view.  She did not understand how a man so romantically in love could be so unpersuadable on certain points.  Hitherto she had had to contend with personal moods, now she was arguing against a policy; and she was gradually to learn that it was as natural to Raymond de Chelles to adore her and resist her as it had been to Ralph Marvell to adore her and let her have her way.  At first, indeed, he appealed to her good sense, using arguments evidently drawn from accumulations of hereditary experience.  But his economic plea was as unintelligible to her as the silly problems about pen-knives and apples in the “Mental Arithmetic” of her infancy; and when he struck a tenderer note and spoke of the duty of providing for the son he hoped for, she put her arms about him to whisper:  “But then I oughtn’t to be worried...”

After that, she noticed, though he was as charming as ever, he behaved as if the case were closed.  He had apparently decided that his arguments were unintelligible to her, and under all his ardour she felt the difference made by the discovery.  It did not make him less kind, but it evidently made her less important; and she had the half-frightened sense that the day she ceased to please him she would cease to exist for him.  That day was a long way off, of course, but the chill of it had brushed her face; and she was no longer heedless of such signs.  She resolved to cultivate all the arts of patience and compliance, and habit might have helped them to take root if they had not been nipped by a new cataclysm.