Her husband stood looking at her coldly and curiously, as though she were some alien apparition his eyes had never before beheld.

“Ah, that’s your answer—­that’s all you feel when you lay hands on things that are sacred to us!” He stopped a moment, and then let his voice break out with the volume she had felt it to be gathering.  “And you’re all alike,” he exclaimed, “every one of you.  You come among us from a country we don’t know, and can’t imagine, a country you care for so little that before you’ve been a day in ours you’ve forgotten the very house you were born in—­if it wasn’t torn down before you knew it!  You come among us speaking our language and not knowing what we mean; wanting the things we want, and not knowing why we want them; aping our weaknesses, exaggerating our follies, ignoring or ridiculing all we care about—­you come from hotels as big as towns, and from towns as flimsy as paper, where the streets haven’t had time to be named, and the buildings are demolished before they’re dry, and the people are as proud of changing as we are of holding to what we have—­and we’re fools enough to imagine that because you copy our ways and pick up our slang you understand anything about the things that make life decent and honourable for us!”

He stopped again, his white face and drawn nostrils giving him so much the look of an extremely distinguished actor in a fine part that, in spite of the vehemence of his emotion, his silence might have been the deliberate pause for a replique.  Undine kept him waiting long enough to give the effect of having lost her cue—­then she brought out, with a little soft stare of incredulity:  “Do you mean to say you’re going to refuse such an offer?”

“Ah—!” He turned back from the door, and picking up the letter that lay on the table between them, tore it in pieces and tossed the pieces on the floor.  “That’s how I refuse it!”

The violence of his tone and gesture made her feel as though the fluttering strips were so many lashes laid across her face, and a rage that was half fear possessed her.

“How dare you speak to me like that?  Nobody’s ever dared to before.  Is talking to a woman in that way one of the things you call decent and honourable?  Now that I know what you feel about me I don’t want to stay in your house another day.  And I don’t mean to—­I mean to walk out of it this very hour!”

For a moment they stood face to face, the depths of their mutual incomprehension at last bared to each other’s angry eyes; then Raymond, his glance travelling past her, pointed to the fragments of paper on the floor.

“If you’re capable of that you’re capable of anything!” he said as he went out of the room.

XLIII

She watched him go in a kind of stupour, knowing that when they next met he would be as courteous and self-possessed as if nothing had happened, but that everything would nevertheless go on in the same way—­in his way—­and that there was no more hope of shaking his resolve or altering his point of view than there would have been of transporting the deep-rooted masonry of Saint Desert by means of the wheeled supports on which Apex architecture performed its easy transits.