“I suppose I’ve turned into a perfect frump down there in that wilderness,” she lamented to Madame de Trezac, who replied inexorably:  “Oh, no, you’re as handsome as ever; but people here don’t go on looking at each other forever as they do in London.”

Meanwhile financial cares became more pressing.  A dunning letter from one of her tradesmen fell into Raymond’s hands, and the talk it led to ended in his making it clear to her that she must settle her personal debts without his aid.  All the “scenes” about money which had disturbed her past had ended in some mysterious solution of her difficulty.  Disagreeable as they were, she had always, vulgarly speaking, found they paid; but now it was she who was expected to pay.  Raymond took his stand without ill-temper or apology:  he simply argued from inveterate precedent.  But it was impossible for Undine to understand a social organization which did not regard the indulging of woman as its first purpose, or to believe that any one taking another view was not moved by avarice or malice; and the discussion ended in mutual acrimony.

The morning afterward, Raymond came into her room with a letter in his hand.

“Is this your doing?” he asked.  His look and voice expressed something she had never known before:  the disciplined anger of a man trained to keep his emotions in fixed channels, but knowing how to fill them to the brim.

The letter was from Mr. Fleischhauer, who begged to transmit to the Marquis de Chelles an offer for his Boucher tapestries from a client prepared to pay the large sum named on condition that it was accepted before his approaching departure for America.

“What does it mean?” Raymond continued, as she did not speak.

“How should I know?  It’s a lot of money,” she stammered, shaken out of her self-possession.  She had not expected so prompt a sequel to the dealer’s visit, and she was vexed with him for writing to Raymond without consulting her.  But she recognized Moffatt’s high-handed way, and her fears faded in the great blaze of the sum he offered.

Her husband was still looking at her.  “It was Fleischhauer who brought a man down to see the tapestries one day when I was away at Beaune?”

He had known, then—­everything was known at Saint Desert!

She wavered a moment and then gave him back his look.

“Yes—­it was Fleischhauer; and I sent for him.”

“You sent for him?”

He spoke in a voice so veiled and repressed that he seemed to be consciously saving it for some premeditated outbreak.  Undine felt its menace, but the thought of Moffatt sent a flame through her, and the words he would have spoken seemed to fly to her lips.

“Why shouldn’t I?  Something had to be done.  We can’t go on as we are.  I’ve tried my best to economize—­I’ve scraped and scrimped, and gone without heaps of things I’ve always had.  I’ve moped for months and months at Saint Desert, and given up sending Paul to school because it was too expensive, and asking my friends to dine because we couldn’t afford it.  And you expect me to go on living like this for the rest of my life, when all you’ve got to do is to hold out your hand and have two million francs drop into it!”