next remittance? And once the hotel bills were paid, what would be left
for the journey back to Paris, the looming expenses there, the price
of the passage to America? These questions would fling him back on the
thought of his projected book, which was, after all, to be what the
masterpieces of literature had mostly been--a pot-boiler. Well! Why not?
Did not the worshipper always heap the rarest essences on the altar of
his divinity? Ralph still rejoiced in the thought of giving back to
Undine something of the beauty of their first months together. But even
on his solitary walks the vision eluded him; and he could spare so few
hours to its pursuit!

Undine's days were crowded, and it was still a matter of course that
where she went he should follow. He had risen visibly in her opinion
since they had been absorbed into the life of the big hotels, and she
had seen that his command of foreign tongues put him at an advantage
even in circles where English was generally spoken if not understood.
Undine herself, hampered by her lack of languages, was soon drawn into
the group of compatriots who struck the social pitch of their hotel.

Their types were familiar enough to Ralph, who had taken their measure
in former wanderings, and come across their duplicates in every scene
of continental idleness. Foremost among them was Mrs. Harvey Shallum,
a showy Parisianized figure, with a small wax-featured husband whose
ultra-fashionable clothes seemed a tribute to his wife's importance
rather than the mark of his personal taste. Mr. Shallum, in fact, could
not be said to have any personal bent. Though he conversed with a
colourless fluency in the principal European tongues, he seldom
exercised his gift except in intercourse with hotel-managers and
head-waiters; and his long silences were broken only by resigned
allusions to the enormities he had suffered at the hands of this gifted
but unscrupulous class.

Mrs. Shallum, though in command of but a few verbs, all of which, on her
lips, became irregular, managed to express a polyglot personality as
vivid as her husband's was effaced. Her only idea of intercourse with
her kind was to organize it into bands and subject it to frequent
displacements; and society smiled at her for these exertions like an
infant vigorously rocked. She saw at once Undine's value as a factor in
her scheme, and the two formed an alliance on which Ralph refrained from
shedding the cold light of depreciation. It w