ad
ever heard of travelling afterward?

What could be the possible object of leaving one's family, one's habits,
one's friends? It was natural that the Americans, who had no homes, who
were born and died in hotels, should have contracted nomadic habits: but
the new Marquise de Chelles was no longer an American, and she had Saint
Desert and the Hotel de Chelles to live in, as generations of ladies of
her name had done before her. Thus Undine beheld her future laid out for
her, not directly and in blunt words, but obliquely and affably, in the
allusions, the assumptions, the insinuations of the amiable women among
whom her days were spent. Their interminable conversations were carried
on to the click of knitting-needles and the rise and fall of industrious
fingers above embroidery-frames; and as Undine sat staring at the
lustrous nails of her idle hands she felt that her inability to occupy
them was regarded as one of the chief causes of her restlessness. The
innumerable rooms of Saint Desert were furnished with the embroidered
hangings and tapestry chairs produced by generations of diligent
chatelaines, and the untiring needles of the old Marquise, her daughters
and dependents were still steadily increasing the provision.

It struck Undine as curious that they should be willing to go on making
chair-coverings and bed-curtains for a house that didn't really belong
to them, and that she had a right to pull about and rearrange as she
chose; but then that was only a part of their whole incomprehensible way
of regarding themselves (in spite of their acute personal and parochial
absorptions) as minor members of a powerful and indivisible whole, the
huge voracious fetish they called The Family.

Notwithstanding their very definite theories as to what Americans were
and were not, they were evidently bewildered at finding no corresponding
sense of solidarity in Undine; and little Paul's rootlessness, his lack
of all local and linear ties, made them (for all the charm he exercised)
regard him with something of the shyness of pious Christians toward
an elfin child. But though mother and child gave them a sense of
insuperable strangeness, it plainly never occurred to them that both
would not be gradually subdued to the customs of Saint Desert. Dynasties
had fallen, institutions changed, manners and morals, alas, deplorably
declined; but as far back as memory went, the ladies of the line of
Chelles had always sat at their needle-wo