It was the same perpetually reiterated condolence; and Undine flushed with anger as she listened.  Why indeed had she let herself be cooped up?  She could not have answered the Princess’s question:  she merely felt the impossibility of breaking through the mysterious web of traditions, conventions, prohibitions that enclosed her in their impenetrable net-work.  But her vanity suggested the obvious pretext, and she murmured with a laugh:  “I didn’t know Raymond was going to be so jealous—­”

The Princess stared.  “Is it Raymond who keeps you shut up here?  And what about his trips to Dijon?  And what do you suppose he does with himself when he runs up to Paris?  Politics?” She shrugged ironically.  “Politics don’t occupy a man after midnight.  Raymond jealous of you?  Ah, merci!  My dear, it’s what I always say when people talk to me about fast Americans:  you’re the only innocent women left in the world...”

XL

After the Princess Estradina’s departure, the days at Saint Desert succeeded each other indistinguishably; and more and more, as they passed, Undine felt herself drawn into the slow strong current already fed by so many tributary lives.  Some spell she could not have named seemed to emanate from the old house which had so long been the custodian of an unbroken tradition:  things had happened there in the same way for so many generations that to try to alter them seemed as vain as to contend with the elements.

Winter came and went, and once more the calendar marked the first days of spring; but though the horse-chestnuts of the Champs Elysees were budding snow still lingered in the grass drives of Saint Desert and along the ridges of the hills beyond the park.  Sometimes, as Undine looked out of the windows of the Boucher gallery, she felt as if her eyes had never rested on any other scene.  Even her occasional brief trips to Paris left no lasting trace:  the life of the vivid streets faded to a shadow as soon as the black and white horizon of Saint Desert closed in on her again.

Though the afternoons were still cold she had lately taken to sitting in the gallery.  The smiling scenes on its walls and the tall screens which broke its length made it more habitable than the drawing-rooms beyond; but her chief reason for preferring it was the satisfaction she found in having fires lit in both the monumental chimneys that faced each other down its long perspective.  This satisfaction had its source in the old Marquise’s disapproval.  Never before in the history of Saint Desert had the consumption of firewood exceeded a certain carefully-calculated measure; but since Undine had been in authority this allowance had been doubled.  If any one had told her, a year earlier, that one of the chief distractions of her new life would be to invent ways of annoying her mother-in-law, she would have laughed at the idea of wasting her time on such trifles.  But she