she had always
Remembering the attention she had attracted on her first appearance in Raymond’s world she concluded that she had "gone off" or grown dowdy, and instead of wasting more time in museums and lecture-halls she prolonged her hours at the dress-maker’s and gave up the rest of the day to the scientific cultivation of her beauty.
"I suppose I’ve turned into a perfect frump down there in that wilderness," she lamented to Madame de Trezac, who replied inexorably: "Oh, no, you’re as handsome as ever; but people here don’t go on looking at each other forever as they do in London."
Meanwhile financial cares became more pressing. A dunning letter from one of her tradesmen fell into Raymond’s hands, and the talk it led to ended in his making it clear to her that she must settle her personal debts without his aid. All the "scenes" about money which had disturbed her past had ended in some mysterious solution of her difficulty. Disagreeable as they were, she had always, vulgarly speaking, found they paid; but now it was she who was expected to pay. Raymond took his stand without ill-temper or apology: he simply argued from inveterate precedent. But it was impossible for Undine to understand a social organization which did not regard the indulging of woman as its first purpose, or to believe that any one taking another view was not moved by avarice or malice; and the discussion ended in mutual acrimony.
The morning afterward, Raymond came into her room with a letter in his hand.
"Is this your doing?" he asked. His look and voice expressed something she had never known before: the disciplined anger of a man trained to keep his emotions in fixed channels, but knowing how to fill them to the brim.
The letter was from Mr. Fleischhauer, who begged to transmit to the Marquis de Chelles an offer for his Boucher tapestries from a client prepared to pay the large sum named on condition that it was accepted before his approaching departure for America.
"What does it mean?" Raymond continued, as she did not speak.
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