Edith Wharton

“ Undine's ill-humour was soon dispelled by any new distraction, and she gave herself to the untroubled enjoyment of Paris. The Shallums were the centre of a like-minded group, and in the hours the ladies could spare from their dress-makers the restaurants shook with their hilarity and the suburbs with the shriek of their motors. Van Degen, who had postponed his sailing, was a frequent sharer in these amusements; but Ralph counted on New York influences to detach him from Undine's train. ”

“ Ralph bent over her in alarm. "Why, what's wrong, dear? What's happened?"
Her fatigue of the previous evening came back to him--a puzzled hunted look in her eyes; and with the memory a vague wonder revived. He had fancied himself fairly disencumbered of the stock formulas about the hallowing effects of motherhood, and there were many reasons for not welcoming the news he suspected she had to give; but the woman a man loves is always a special case, and everything was different that befell Undine. ”

“ Ralph was beginning to learn that the only road to her reason lay through her vanity, and he fancied that if she could be made to see Van Degen as an object of ridicule she might give up the idea of the Sorceress of her own accord. But her will hardened slowly under his joking opposition, and she became no less formidable as she grew more calm. He was used to women who, in such cases, yielded as a matter of course to masculine judgments: if one pronounced a man "not decent" the question was closed. ”

“ YOU won't hate yourself more and more every morning when you get up and see yourself in the glass! YOUR life's going on just as usual! But what's mine going to be for months and months? And just as I'd been to all this bother--fagging myself to death about all these things--" her tragic gesture swept the disordered room--"just as I thought I was going home to enjoy myself, and look nice, and see people again, and have a little pleasure after all our worries--" She dropped back on the sofa with another burst of tears. ”

“ Ralph reddened, but laughed.
"Oh, Undine's wonderfully able to defend herself, even against such seductions as Peter's."
Mrs. Van Degen looked down with a smile at the bracelets on her thin brown wrist. "His personal seductions--yes. But as an inventor of amusements he's inexhaustible; and Undine likes to be amused." ”

“ Touch and tone were enough to disperse his anxieties, and he answered that he was in luck to find her already in when he had supposed her engaged, over a Nouveau Luxe tea-table, in repairing the afternoon's ravages.
"Oh, I didn't shop much--I didn't stay out long." She raised a kindling face to him. "And what do you think I've been doing? While you were sitting in your stuffy old theatre, worrying about the money I was spending (oh, you needn't fib--I know you were!) I was saving you hundreds and thousands. ”

“ He therefore listened with apparent good-humour to Peter's suggestion of an evening at a petit theatre with the Harvey Shallums, and joined in the laugh with which Undine declared: "Oh, Ralph won't go--he only likes the theatres where they walk around in bathtowels and talk poetry.--Isn't that what you've just been seeing?" she added, with a turn of the neck that shed her brightness on him.
"What? One of those five-barrelled shows at the Fran�ais? Great Scott, Ralph--no wonder your wife's pining for the Folies Berg�re!"
"She needn't, my dear fellow. We never interfere with each other's vices." ”