ossession
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