“Sell it?  Sell Saint Desert?”

The suggestion seemed to strike him as something monstrously, almost fiendishly significant:  as if her random word had at last thrust into his hand the clue to their whole unhappy difference.  Without understanding this, she guessed it from the change in his face:  it was as if a deadly solvent had suddenly decomposed its familiar lines.

“Well, why not?” His horror spurred her on.  “You might sell some of the things in it anyhow.  In America we’re not ashamed to sell what we can’t afford to keep.”  Her eyes fell on the storied hangings at his back.  “Why, there’s a fortune in this one room:  you could get anything you chose for those tapestries.  And you stand here and tell me you’re a pauper!”

His glance followed hers to the tapestries, and then returned to her face.  “Ah, you don’t understand,” he said.

“I understand that you care for all this old stuff more than you do for me, and that you’d rather see me unhappy and miserable than touch one of your great-grandfather’s arm-chairs.”

The colour came slowly back to his face, but it hardened into lines she had never seen.  He looked at her as though the place where she stood were empty.  “You don’t understand,” he said again.

XLI

The incident left Undine with the baffled feeling of not being able to count on any of her old weapons of aggression.  In all her struggles for authority her sense of the rightfulness of her cause had been measured by her power of making people do as she pleased.  Raymond’s firmness shook her faith in her own claims, and a blind desire to wound and destroy replaced her usual business-like intentness on gaining her end.  But her ironies were as ineffectual as her arguments, and his imperviousness was the more exasperating because she divined that some of the things she said would have hurt him if any one else had said them:  it was the fact of their coming from her that made them innocuous.  Even when, at the close of their talk, she had burst out:  “If you grudge me everything I care about we’d better separate,” he had merely answered with a shrug:  “It’s one of the things we don’t do—­” and the answer had been like the slamming of an iron door in her face.

An interval of silent brooding had resulted in a reaction of rebellion.  She dared not carry out her threat of joining her compatriots at the Nouveau Luxe:  she had too clear a memory of the results of her former revolt.  But neither could she submit to her present fate without attempting to make Raymond understand his selfish folly.  She had failed to prove it by argument, but she had an inherited faith in the value of practical demonstration.  If he could be made to see how easily he could give her what she wanted perhaps he might come round to her view.

With this idea in mind, she had gone up to Paris for twenty-four hours, on the pretext of finding a new nurse for Paul; and the steps then taken had enabled her, on the first occasion, to set her plan in motion.  The occasion was furnished by Raymond’s next trip to Beaune.  He went off early one morning, leaving word that he should not be back till night; and on the afternoon of the same day she stood at her usual post in the gallery, scanning the long perspective of the poplar avenue.