dishly significant: as if her random word had at last thrust
into his hand the clue to their whole unhappy difference. Without
understanding this, she guessed it from the change in his face: it was
as if a deadly solvent had suddenly decomposed its familiar lines.

"Well, why not?" His horror spurred her on. "You might sell some of the
things in it anyhow. In America we're not ashamed to sell what we can't
afford to keep." Her eyes fell on the storied hangings at his back.
"Why, there's a fortune in this one room: you could get anything you
chose for those tapestries. And you stand here and tell me you're a
pauper!"

His glance followed hers to the tapestries, and then returned to her
face. "Ah, you don't understand," he said.

"I understand that you care for all this old stuff more than you do for
me, and that you'd rather see me unhappy and miserable than touch one of
your great-grandfather's arm-chairs."

The colour came slowly back to his face, but it hardened into lines she
had never seen. He looked at her as though the place where she stood
were empty. "You don't understand," he said again.

XLI

The incident left Undine with the baffled feeling of not being able to
count on any of her old weapons of aggression. In all her struggles for
authority her sense of the rightfulness of her cause had been measured
by her power of making people do as she pleased. Raymond's firmness
shook her faith in her own claims, and a blind desire to wound and
destroy replaced her usual business-like intentness on gaining her
end. But her ironies were as ineffectual as her arguments, and his
imperviousness was the more exasperating because she divined that some
of the things she said would have hurt him if any one else had said
them: it was the fact of their coming from her that made them innocuous.
Even when, at the close of their talk, she had burst out: "If you grudge
me everything I care about we'd better separate," he had merely answered
with a shrug: "It's one of the things we don't do--" and the answer had
been like the slamming of an iron door in her face.

An interval of silent brooding had resulted in a reaction of rebellion.
She dared not carry out her threat of joining her compatriots at the
Nouveau Luxe: she had too clear a memory of the results of her former
revolt. But neither could she submit to her present fate without
attempting to make Raymond understand his selfish folly. She had failed
to prove it by ar