borating the
ceremonial, and in making the ancestral plate groan under more varied
viands; and when this palled she devised the plan of performing the
office in the gallery and lighting sacrificial fires in both chimneys.

She had said to Raymond, at first: "It's ridiculous that your mother
should sit in her bedroom all day. She says she does it to save fires;
but if we have a fire downstairs why can't she let hers go out, and come
down? I don't see why I should spend my life in your mother's bedroom."

Raymond made no answer, and the Marquise did, in fact, let her fire go
out. But she did not come down--she simply continued to sit upstairs
without a fire.

At first this also amused Undine; then the tacit criticism implied began
to irritate her. She hoped Raymond would speak of his mother's attitude:
she had her answer ready if he did! But he made no comment, he took no
notice; her impulses of retaliation spent themselves against the blank
surface of his indifference. He was as amiable, as considerate as ever;
as ready, within reason, to accede to her wishes and gratify her whims.
Once or twice, when she suggested running up to Paris to take Paul to
the dentist, or to look for a servant, he agreed to the necessity and
went up with her. But instead of going to an hotel they went to their
apartment, where carpets were up and curtains down, and a care-taker
prepared primitive food at uncertain hours; and Undine's first glimpse
of Hubert's illuminated windows deepened her rancour and her sense of
helplessness.

As Madame de Trezac had predicted, Raymond's vigilance gradually
relaxed, and during their excursions to the capital Undine came and went
as she pleased. But her visits were too short to permit of her falling
in with the social pace, and when she showed herself among her friends
she felt countrified and out-of-place, as if even her clothes had come
from Saint Desert. Nevertheless her dresses were more than ever her
chief preoccupation: in Paris she spent hours at the dressmaker's, and
in the country the arrival of a box of new gowns was the chief event
of the vacant days. But there was more bitterness than joy in the
unpacking, and the dresses hung in her wardrobe like so many unfulfilled
promises of pleasure, reminding her of the days at the Stentorian when
she had reviewed other finery with the same cheated eyes. In spite of
this, she multiplied her orders, writing up to the dress-makers for
patterns, and to th