re urgent uses for their
brilliant wind-fall: heavy arrears of household debts had to be met, and
the summer would bring its own burden. But perhaps another stroke of
luck might befall him: he was getting to have the drifting dependence
on "luck" of the man conscious of his inability to direct his life. And
meanwhile it seemed easier to let Undine have what she wanted.

Undine, on the whole, behaved with discretion. She received the good
news languidly and showed no unseemly haste to profit by it. But it was
as hard to hide the light in her eyes as to dissemble the fact that she
had not only thought out every detail of the trip in advance, but had
decided exactly how her husband and son were to be disposed of in her
absence. Her suggestion that Ralph should take Paul to his grandparents,
and that the West End Avenue house should be let for the summer, was too
practical not to be acted on; and Ralph found she had already put her
hand on the Harry Lipscombs, who, after three years of neglect, were to
be dragged back to favour and made to feel, as the first step in their
reinstatement, the necessity of hiring for the summer months a cool airy
house on the West Side. On her return from Europe, Undine explained, she
would of course go straight to Ralph and the boy in the Adirondacks; and
it seemed a foolish extravagance to let the house stand empty when the
Lipscombs were so eager to take it.

As the day of departure approached it became harder for her to temper
her beams; but her pleasure showed itself so amiably that Ralph began
to think she might, after all, miss the boy and himself more than she
imagined. She was tenderly preoccupied with Paul's welfare, and, to
prepare for his translation to his grandparents' she gave the household
in Washington Square more of her time than she had accorded it since her
marriage. She explained that she wanted Paul to grow used to his new
surroundings; and with that object she took him frequently to his
grandmother's, and won her way into old Mr. Dagonet's sympathies by her
devotion to the child and her pretty way of joining in his games.

Undine was not consciously acting a part: this new phase was as natural
to her as the other. In the joy of her gratified desires she wanted to
make everybody about her happy. If only everyone would do as she wished
she would never be unreasonable. She much preferred to see smiling faces
about her, and her dread of the reproachful and dissatisfied coun