ty to be seen with her, and to
hear that rumour coupled their names; but he gave her, more than any
one she had ever known, the sense of being detached from his life, in
control of it, and able, without weakness or uncertainty, to choose
which of its calls he should obey. If the call were that of business--of
any of the great perilous affairs he handled like a snake-charmer
spinning the deadly reptiles about his head--she knew she would drop
from his life like a loosened leaf.

These anxieties sharpened the intensity of her enjoyment, and made the
contrast keener between her crowded sparkling hours and the vacant
months at Saint Desert. Little as she understood of the qualities that
made Moffatt what he was, the results were of the kind most palpable to
her. He used life exactly as she would have used it in his place. Some
of his enjoyments were beyond her range, but even these appealed to her
because of the money that was required to gratify them. When she took
him to see some inaccessible picture, or went with him to inspect the
treasures of a famous dealer, she saw that the things he looked at moved
him in a way she could not understand, and that the actual touching of
rare textures--bronze or marble, or velvets flushed with the bloom of
age--gave him sensations like those her own beauty had once roused in
him. But the next moment he was laughing over some commonplace joke, or
absorbed in a long cipher cable handed to him as they re-entered the
Nouveau Luxe for tea, and his aesthetic emotions had been thrust back
into their own compartment of the great steel strong-box of his mind.

Her new life went on without comment or interference from her husband,
and she saw that he had accepted their altered relation, and intended
merely to keep up an external semblance of harmony. To that semblance
she knew he attached intense importance: it was an article of his
complicated social creed that a man of his class should appear to live
on good terms with his wife. For different reasons it was scarcely
less important to Undine: she had no wish to affront again the social
reprobation that had so nearly wrecked her. But she could not keep up
the life she was leading without more money, a great deal more money;
and the thought of contracting her expenditure was no longer tolerable.

One afternoon, several weeks later, she came in to find a tradesman's
representative waiting with a bill. There was a noisy scene in the
anteroom befo