It was a different matter that one day brought the look he feared to her face. She had announced her intention of going on an excursion with Mrs. Shallum and three or four of the young men who formed the nucleus of their shifting circle, and for the first time she did not ask Ralph if he were coming; but he felt no resentment at being left out. He was tired of these noisy assaults on the high solitudes, and the prospect of a quiet afternoon turned his thoughts to his book. Now if ever there seemed a chance of recapturing the moonlight vision…
From his balcony he looked down on the assembling party. Mrs. Shallum was already screaming bilingually at various windows in the long facade; and Undine presently came out of the hotel with the Marchese Roviano and two young English diplomatists. Slim and tall in her trim mountain garb, she made the ornate Mrs. Shallum look like a piece of ambulant upholstery. The high air brightened her cheeks and struck new lights from her hair, and Ralph had never seen her so touched with morning freshness. The party was not yet complete, and he felt a movement of annoyance when he recognized, in the last person to join it, a Russian lady of cosmopolitan notoriety whom he had run across in his unmarried days, and as to whom he had already warned Undine. Knowing what strange specimens from the depths slip through the wide meshes of the watering-place world, he had foreseen that a meeting with the Baroness Adelschein was inevitable; but he had not expected her to become one of his wife’s intimate circle.
When the excursionists had started he turned back to his writing-table and tried to take up his work; but he could not fix his thoughts: they were far away, in pursuit of Undine. He had been but five months married, and it seemed, after all, rather soon for him to be dropped out of such excursions as unquestioningly as poor Harvey Shallum. He smiled away this first twinge of jealousy, but the irritation it left found a pretext in his displeasure at Undine’s choice of companions. Mrs. Shallum grated on his taste, but she was as open to inspection as a shop-window, and he was sure that time would teach his wife the cheapness of what she had to show. Roviano and the Englishmen were well enough too: frankly bent on amusement, but pleasant and well-bred. But they would naturally take their tone from the women they were with; and Madame Adelschein’s tone was notorious. He knew also that Undine’s faculty of self-defense was weakened by the instinct of adapting herself to whatever company she was in, of copying “the others” in speech and gesture as closely as she reflected them in dress; and he was disturbed by the thought of what her ignorance might expose her to.
She came back late, flushed with her long walk, her face all sparkle and mystery, as he had seen it in the first days of their courtship; and the look somehow revived his irritated sense of having been intentionally left out of the party.
“You’ve been gone forever. Was it the Adelschein who made you go such lengths?” he asked her, trying to keep to his usual joking tone.
Undine, as she dropped down on the sofa and unpinned her hat, shed on him the light of her guileless gaze.
“I don’t know: everybody was amusing. The Marquis is awfully bright.”
“I’d no idea you or Bertha Shallum knew Madame Adelschein well enough to take her off with you in that way.”
Undine sat absently smoothing the tuft of glossy cock’s-feathers in her hat.
“I don’t see that you’ve got to know people particularly well to go for a walk with them. The Baroness is awfully bright too.”
She always gave her acquaintances their titles, seeming not, in this respect, to have noticed that a simpler form prevailed.
“I don’t dispute the interest of what she says; but I’ve told you what decent people think of what she does,” Ralph retorted, exasperated by what seemed a wilful pretense of ignorance.
She continued to scrutinize him with her clear eyes, in which there was no shadow of offense.
“You mean they don’t want to go round with her? You’re mistaken: it’s not true. She goes round with everybody. She dined last night with the Grand Duchess; Roviano told me so.”
This was not calculated to make Ralph take a more tolerant view of the question.
“Does he also tell you what’s said of her?”
“What’s said of her?” Undine’s limpid glance rebuked him. “Do you mean that disgusting scandal you told me about? Do you suppose I’d let him talk to me about such things? I meant you’re mistaken about her social position. He says she goes everywhere.”
Ralph laughed impatiently. “No doubt Roviano’s an authority; but it doesn’t happen to be his business to choose your friends for you.”
Undine echoed his laugh. “Well, I guess I don’t need anybody to do that: I can do it myself,” she said, with the good-humoured curtness that was the habitual note of intercourse with the Spraggs.
Ralph sat down beside her and laid a caressing touch on her shoulder. “No, you can’t, you foolish child. You know nothing of this society you’re in; of its antecedents, its rules, its conventions; and it’s my affair to look after you, and warn you when you’re on the wrong track.”
“Mercy, what a solemn speech!” She shrugged away his hand without ill-temper. “I don’t believe an American woman needs to know such a lot about their old rules. They can see I mean to follow my own, and if they don’t like it they needn’t go with me.”
“Oh, they’ll go with you fast enough, as you call it. They’ll be too charmed to. The question is how far they’ll make you go with THEM, and where they’ll finally land you.”
She tossed her head back with the movement she had learned in “speaking” school-pieces about freedom and the British tyrant.
“No one’s ever yet gone any farther with me than I wanted!” she declared. She was really exquisitely simple.
“I’m not sure Roviano hasn’t, in vouching for Madame Adelschein. But he probably thinks you know about her. To him this isn’t ‘society’ any more than the people in an omnibus are. Society, to everybody here, means the sanction of their own special group and of the corresponding groups elsewhere. The Adelschein goes about in a place like this because it’s nobody’s business to stop her; but the women who tolerate her here would drop her like a shot if she set foot on their own ground.”
The thoughtful air with which Undine heard him out made him fancy this argument had carried; and as be ended she threw him a bright look.
“Well, that’s easy enough: I can drop her if she comes to New York.”
Ralph sat silent for a moment—then he turned away and began to gather up his scattered pages.
Undine, in the ensuing days, was no less often with Madame Adelschein, and Ralph suspected a challenge in her open frequentation of the lady. But if challenge there were, he let it lie. Whether his wife saw more or less of Madame Adelschein seemed no longer of much consequence: she had so amply shown him her ability to protect herself. The pang lay in the completeness of the proof—in the perfect functioning of her instinct of self-preservation. For the first time he was face to face with his hovering dread: he was judging where he still adored.
Before long more pressing cares absorbed him. He had already begun to watch the post for his father-in-law’s monthly remittance, without precisely knowing how, even with its aid, he was to bridge the gulf of expense between St. Moritz and New York. The non-arrival of Mr. Spragg’s cheque was productive of graver tears, and these were abruptly confirmed when, coming in one afternoon, he found Undine crying over a letter from her mother.
Her distress made him fear that Mr. Spragg was ill, and he drew her to him soothingly; but she broke away with an impatient movement.
“Oh, they’re all well enough—but father’s lost a lot of money. He’s been speculating, and he can’t send us anything for at least three months.”
Ralph murmured reassuringly: “As long as there’s no one ill!”—but in reality he was following her