 CHAPTER 1 Undine Sprague, how can you, her mother wailed, raising a prematurely wrinkled hand heavy with rings, to defend the note which a languid bell-boy had just brought in. But her defense was as feeble as her protest, and she continued to smile on her visitor while Miss Sprague, with a turn of her quick young fingers, possessed herself of the missive and withdrew to the window to read it. I guess it's meant for me, she merely threw over her shoulder at her mother. Did you ever, Mrs. Heaney? Mrs. Sprague murmured with deprecating pride. Mrs. Heaney, a stout professional-looking person and a waterproof, her rusty veil thrown back, and a shabby alligator bag at her feet, followed the mother's glance with good-humored approval. I never met with a lovelier form, she agreed, answering the spirit rather than the letter of her hostess's inquiry. Mrs. Sprague and her visitor were enthroned in two heavy-guilt arm-chairs in one of the private drawing-rooms of the hotel stentorian. The Sprague-rooms were known as one of the Louis suites, and the drawing-room walls above their wainscoting of highly vartished mahogany were hung with salmon-pink damask and adorned with oval portraits of Marie Antoinette and the Princess de Lambeau. In the center of the florid carpet, a gilt table with the top of Mexican onyx sustained a palm and a gilt basket tied with a pink bow. But for this ornament and a copy of the Hound of the Baskervilles which lay beside it, the room showed no traces of human use, and Mrs. Sprague herself wore as complete an air of detachment as if she had been a wax figure in a show window. Her attire was fashionable enough to justify such a post, and her pale, soft-cheek face with puffy eyelids and drooping mouth suggested a partially melted wax figure which had run to double chin. Mrs. Heaney, in comparison, had a reassuring look of solidity and reality. The planting of her firm black bulk in its chair and the grasp of her broad red hands on the gilt arms bespoke an organized and self-reliant activity, accounted for by the fact that Mrs. Heaney was a society, manicure, and masseuse. Toward Mrs. Sprague and her daughter, she filled the double role of manipulator and friend, and it was in the latter capacity that, her day's task ended, she had dropped in for a moment to cheer up the lonely ladies of the Stentorian. The young girl whose form had won Mrs. Heaney's professional commendation suddenly shifted its lovely lines as she turned back from the window. Here you can have it after all, she said, crumpling the note and tossing it with a contemptuous gesture into her mother's lap. Why, isn't it from Mr. Popple? Mrs. Sprague exclaimed unguardedly. No, it isn't. What made you think I thought it was? snapped her daughter, but the next instant she added, with an outbreak of childish disappointment, it's only for Mr. Marvel's sister. At least she says she's his sister. Mrs. Sprague, with a puzzled frown, grope for her eyeglass among the jet fringes of her tightly girded front. Mrs. Heaney's small blue eyes shot out sparks of curiosity. Marvel? What Marvel is that? The girl explained languidly. A little fellow, I think Mr. Popple said his name was Ralph. While her mother continued, Undean met them both last night at that party downstairs, and from something Mr. Popple said to her about going to one of the new plays, she thought, How on earth do you know what I thought? Undean flashed back, her gray eyes darting warnings at her mother under their straight black brows. Why, you said you thought! Mrs. Sprague began reproachfully, but Mrs. Heaney, heedless of their bickering, was pursuing her own train of thought. What Popple? Claude Walsingham Popple, the portrait painter? Yes, I suppose so. He said he'd like to paint me. Mabel Lipscomb introduced him. I don't care if I never see him again, the girl said, bathed in angry pink. Do you know him, Mrs. Heaney, Mrs. Sprague inquired? I should say I did. I manicured him for his first society portrait, a full length of Mrs. Harmon B. Driscoll. Mrs. Heaney smiled indulgently on her hearers. I know everybody. If they don't know me, they ate in it, and Claude Walsingham Popple's in it. But he ate nearly as in it, she continued judiciously, as Ralph Marvel, the little fellow, as you call him. Undean Sprague, at the word, swept round on the speaker with one of the quick turns that revealed her youthful flexibility. She was always doubling and twisting on herself, and every movement she made seemed to start at the nape of her neck, just below the lifted roll of reddish-gold hair, and flow without a break through her whole slim length to the tips of her fingers and the points of her slender, restless feet. Why, do you know the Marvels? Are they stylish? she asked. Mrs. Heaney gave the discouraged gesture of a pedagogue who has vaguely striven to implant the rudiments of knowledge in a rebellious mind. Why, Undean Sprague, I've told you all about them time and again. His mother was a Dagonet. They live with old urban Dagonet down in Washington Square. To Mrs. Sprague, this conveyed even less than to her daughter. Way down there. Why do they live with somebody else? Haven't they got the means to have a home of their own? Undean's perceptions were more rapid, and she fixed her eyes searchingly on Mrs. Heaney. Do you mean to say Mr. Marvel's as swell as Mr. Popple? As, well, why Claude Walsing and Popple ain't in the same class with him. The girl was upon her mother with a spring, snatching and smoothing out the crumpled note. Laura Fairford, is that the sister's name? Mrs. Henley Fairford, yes. What does she write about? Undean's face lit up as if a shaft of sunset had struck it through the triple curtained windows of the Statorian. She says she wants me to dine with her next Wednesday. Isn't it queer? Why does she want me? She's never seen me. Her tone implied that she had long been accustomed to being wanted by those who had. Mrs. Heaney laughed. He saw you, didn't he? Who? Ralph Marvel? Well, of course he did. Mr. Popple brought him to the party here last night. Well, there you are. What a young man in society wants to meet a girl again, he gets his sister to ask her. Undean stared at her incredulously. How queer! But they haven't all got sisters, have they? It must be fearfully pokey for the ones that haven't. They get their mothers or their married friends, said Mrs. Heaney omnisciently. Married gentlemen, inquired Mrs. Sprague, slightly shocked but genuinely desirous of mastering her lesson. Mercy know, married ladies. But are there never any gentlemen present, pursued Mrs. Sprague, feeling that if this were the case, Undean would certainly be disappointed. Present where? At their dinners? Of course. Mrs. Fairford gives the smartest little dinners in town. There was an account of one that she gave last week in this morning's town talk. I guess it's right here among my clippings. Mrs. Heaney, swooping down on her bag, threw from it a handful of newspaper cuttings, which she spread on her ample lap and proceeded to sort with a moistened forefinger. Here, she said, holding one of the slips at arm's length and throwing back her head, she read in a slow, unpunctuated chant. Mrs. Henley Fairford gave another of her natty little dinners last Wednesday as usual. It was small, smart, and exclusive, and there was much gnashing of teeth among the left-outs as Madame Olga Lewenska gave some of her new step-dances after dinner. That's the French for new dance steps, Mrs. Henley concluded, thrusting the documents back into her bag. Do you know Mrs. Fairford too? Undean asked eagerly, while Mrs. Sprague, impressed but anxious for facts, pursued. Does she reside on Fifth Avenue? No, she has a little house in 38th Street down beyond Park Avenue. The latest faces dropped again, and the masseuse went on promptly, but they're glad enough to have her in the big houses. Why, yes, I know her, she said, addressing herself to Undean. I masked her for a sprained ankle a couple of years ago. She's got a lovely manner, but no conversation. Some of my patients converse exquisitely, Mrs. Henley added, with discrimination. Undean was brooding over the note. It is written to Mother, Mrs. Abner E. Sprague. I never saw anything so funny. Will you allow your daughter to dine with me? Allow. Is Mrs. Fairford peculiar? No, you are, said Mrs. Henley bluntly. Don't you know it's the thing in the best society to pretend that girls can't do anything without their mother's permission? You just remember that, Undean. You mustn't accept invitations from gentlemen without you say you've got to ask your mother first. Mercy, but how will mother know what to say? Why, she'll say what you tell her to, of course. You'd better tell her that you want to dine with Mrs. Fairford. Mrs. Henley added humorously as she gathered her waterproof together and stooped for her bag. Have I got to write the note, then? Mrs. Sprague asked with rising agitation. Mrs. Henley reflected. I know. I guess Undean can write it as if it was from you. Mrs. Fairford don't know your writing. This was an evident relief to Mrs. Sprague, because Undean swept to her room with a note her mother sank back murmuring plaintively. Oh, don't go yet, Mrs. Henley. I haven't seen a human being all day, and I can't seem to find anything to say to that French maid. Mrs. Henley looked at her hostess with friendly compassion. She was well aware that she was the only bright spot on Mrs. Sprague's horizon. Since the Spragues some two years previously had moved from Apex City to New York, they had made little progress in establishing relations with the new environment. And when, about four months earlier, Mrs. Sprague's doctor had called in Mrs. Henley to minister professionally to his patient. He had done more for her spirit than for her body. Mrs. Henley had had such cases before. She knew the rich, helpless family, stranded in a lonely splendor in a sumptuous westside hotel, with a father compelled to seek a semblance of social life at the hotel bar, and a mother deprived of even this contact with her kind, and reduced to illness by boredom and inactivity. Poor Mrs. Sprague had done her own washing in her youth, but since her rising fortunes had made this occupation unsuitable, she had sunk into the relative inertia which the ladies of Apex City regarded as one of the prerogatives of affluence. At Apex, however, she had belonged to a social club, and, until they moved to the Mealy House, had been kept busy by the incessant struggle with domestic cares, whereas New York seemed to offer no field for any form of ladylock activity. She, therefore, took her exercise vicariously with Mrs. Henley's help, and Mrs. Henley knew how to manipulate her imagination as well as her muscles. It was Mrs. Henley who peopled the solitude of the long ghostly days with lively anecdotes of the Van Diegens, the Driscolls, the Chauncey Ellingses, and the other social potentates whose least doings Mrs. Sprague and Undine had followed from afar at the Apex papers, and who had come to seem so much more remote since only the width of the Central Park divided mother and daughter from their Olympian portals. Mrs. Sprague had no ambition for herself. She seemed to have transferred her whole personality to her child, but she was passionately resolved that Undine should have what she wanted, and she sometimes fancied that Mrs. Henley, who crossed those sacred thresholds so familiarly, might someday gain admission for Undine. Well, I'll stay a little might longer if you want, and supposing I was to rub up your nails while we're talking, it'll be more sociable. The masseuse suggested lifting her bag to the table and covering its shiny onyx surface with bottles and polishers. Mrs. Sprague consentingly slipped up the rings from her small mottled hands. It was soothing to feel herself in Mrs. Henley's grasp, and though she knew the attention would cost her $3, she was secure in the sense that Abner wouldn't mind. It had been clear to Mrs. Sprague ever since their rather precipitant departure from Apex City that Abner was resolved not to mind, resolved at any cost to see through the New York adventure. It seemed likely now that the cost would be considerable. They had lived in New York for two years without any social benefit to their daughter, and it was of course for that purpose that they had come. If at the time there had been other and more pressing reasons, they were such as Mrs. Sprague and her husband never touched on, even in the gilded privacy of their bedroom at the Stentorian, and so completely had the silence closed in on the subject that to Mrs. Sprague it had become non-existent. She really believed that as Abner put it, they had left Apex because Undine was too big for the place. She seemed as yet poor child too small for New York, actually imperceptible to its heedless multitudes, and her mother trembled for the day when her invisibility should be borne in on her. Mrs. Sprague did not mind the long delay for herself. She had stores of lymphatic patients, but she had noticed lately that Undine was beginning to be nervous, and there was nothing that Undine's parents dreaded so much as her being nervous. Mrs. Sprague's maternal apprehensions unconsciously escaped in her next words. I do hope she'll quiet down now, she murmured, feeling quieter herself as her hand sank into Mrs. Heaney's roomy palm. Who's that, Undine? Yes, she seemed so set on that Mr. Popples coming round. From the way he acted last night she thought he'd be sure to come round this morning. She's so lonesome, poor child. I can't say as I blame her. Oh, he'll come round. Things don't happen as quick as that in New York," said Mrs. Heaney, driving her nail-polisher cheeringly. Mrs. Sprague sighed again. They don't appear to. They say New Yorkers are always in a hurry, but I can't say as they've hurried much to make our acquaintance. Mrs. Heaney drew back to study the effect of her work. You wait, Mrs. Sprague. You wait. If you go too fast, you sometimes have to rip out the whole scene. Oh, that's so. That's so," Mrs. Sprague exclaimed with a tragic emphasis that made the masseuse glance up at her. Of course it's so, and it's more so in New York than anywhere. The wrong sets like fly paper. Once you're in it, you can pull and pull, but you'll never get out of it again. Undine's mother heaved another and more helpless sigh. I wish you'd tell Undine that, Mrs. Heaney. Oh, I guess Undine's all right. A girl like her can afford to wait, and if young Marvel's really taken with her, she'll have the run of the place in no time. This solacing thought enabled Mrs. Sprague to yield herself unreservedly to Mrs. Heaney's ministrations, which were prolonged for a happy, confidential hour. And she had just bitten the masseuse goodbye and was restoring the rings to her fingers when the door opened to admit her husband. Mr. Sprague came in silently, setting his high hat down on the center table and laying his overcoat across one of the gilt chairs. He was tallish, gray-bearded, and somewhat stooping, with the slack figure of the sedentary man who would be stout if he were not dispeptic. And his cautious gray eyes with pouch-like underlids had straight black brows like his daughters. His thin hair was worn a little too long over his coat collar, and a masonic emblem dangled from the heavy gold chain which crossed his crumpled black waistcoat. He stood still, in the middle of the room, casting a slow, pioneering glance about its gilded void. Then he said quietly, Well, mother? Mrs. Sprague remained seated, but her eyes dwelt on him affectionately. Undean's been asked out to a dinner party, and Mrs. Heaney says it's to one of the first families. It's the sister of one of the gentlemen that Mabel Lipscomb introduced her to last night. There was a mild triumph in her tone, for it was owing to her insistence, and Undean's, that Mr. Sprague had been induced to give up the house they had bought in West End Avenue, and moved with his family to the Stentorian. Undean had early decided that they could not hope to get on while they kept house. All the fashionable people she knew either boarded or lived in hotels. Mrs. Sprague was easily induced to take the same view, but Mr. Sprague had resisted, being at the moment unable either to sell his house or to let it as advantageously as he had hoped. After the move was made, it seemed for a time as though he had been right, and the first social steps would be as difficult to make in a hotel as in one's own house. And Mrs. Sprague was therefore eager to have him know that Undean really owed her first invitation to a meeting under the roof of the Stentorian. You see, with a right to come here, Abner, she added, as he absently rejoined. I guess you two always managed to be right, but his face remained unsmiling, and instead of seating himself and lighting his cigar, as he usually did before dinner, he took two or three aimless turns about the room, and then paused in front of his wife. What's the matter? Anything wrong downtown? she asked, her eyes reflecting his anxiety. Mrs. Sprague's knowledge of what went on downtown was of the most elementary kind, but her husband's face was the barometer in which she had long been accustomed to read the leaves to go on unrestrictedly, or the warning to pause and abstain until the coming storm be weathered. He shook his head. No, nothing worse than what I can see to if you and Undean will go steady for a while. He paused and looked across the room at his daughter's door. Where is she? Out. I guess she's in her room doling over her dresses with that French maid. I don't know if she's got anything fit to wear to that dinner. Mrs. Sprague added in a tentative murmur. Mr. Sprague smiled at last. Well, I guess she will have, he said prophetically. He glanced again at his daughter's door as if to make sure if it's being shut. Then, standing close before his wife, he lowered his voice to say, I saw Elmer Moffat downtown today. Oh, Abner! A wave of almost physical apprehension passed over Mrs. Sprague. Her jeweled hands trembled in her black brocade lap, and the pulpy curves of her face collapsed as if it were a pricked balloon. Oh, Abner! She moaned again, her eyes also on her daughter's door. Mr. Sprague's black eyebrows gathered in an angry frown, but it was evident that his anger was not against his wife. What's the good of oh, Abnering? Elmer Moffat's nothing to us, no more if we'd never laid eyes on him. No, I know it, but what's he doing here? Did you speak to him? She faltered. He slipped his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. No, I guess Elmer and I are pretty well talked out. Mrs. Sprague took up her moan. Don't you tell her you saw him, Abner? I'll do as you say, but she may meet him herself. Oh, I guess not, not in this news that she's going with. Don't tell her anyhow. He turned away, feeling for one of the cigars which he always carried loose in his pocket, and his wife, rising, stole after him and laid her hand on his arm. He can't do anything to her, can he? Do anything to her? He swung about furiously. I'd like to see him touch her, that's all. End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 of The Custom of the Country This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Andrea Mossman. The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton, Chapter 2 Undean's white and gold bedroom with sea-green panels and old rose carpet looked along 72nd Street toward the leafless tree-tops of the Central Park. She went to the window, and drawing back its many layers of lace, gazed eastward down the long brownstone perspective. Beyond the park lay Fifth Avenue, and Fifth Avenue was where she wanted to be. She turned back into the room, and going to her writing table laid Mrs. Fairford's note before her, and began to study it minutely. She had read in the Boudoir chat of one of the Sunday papers that the smartest women were using on paper with white ink, and rather against her mother's advice, she had ordered a large supply with her monogram and silver. It was a disappointment, therefore, to find that Mrs. Fairford wrote on the old-fashioned white sheet without even a monogram, simply her address and telephone number. It gave Undean rather a poor opinion of Mrs. Fairford's social standing, and for a moment she thought with considerable satisfaction of answering the note on her pigeon-blood paper. It was Undean's emphatic commendation of Mrs. Fairford and her pen-wavered. What if white paper were really newer than pigeon-blood? It might be more stylish anyhow. Well, she didn't care if Mrs. Fairford didn't like red paper, she did, and she wasn't going to chuckle to any woman who lived in a small house down Park Avenue. Undean was fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative. She wanted to surprise everyone by her dash in originality, while modeling herself on the last person she met, and the confusion of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation when she had to choose between two courses. She hesitated a moment longer and then took from the drawer a plain sheet with the hotel address. It was amusing to write the note in her mother's name. She giggled as she formed the phrase, I shall be happy to permit my daughter to take dinner with you. Take dinner seemed more elegant to Mrs. Fairford's dime, but when she came to the signature she was met by a new difficulty. Mrs. Fairford had signed herself Laura Fairford, just as one school girl would write to another. But could this be a proper model for Mrs. Sprague? Undean could not tolerate the thought if her mother's abasing herself to a denizen of regions beyond Park Avenue, and she resolutely formed the signature Sincerely, Mrs. Abner E. Sprague. Then uncertainty overcame her and she rewrote her note in the formula, Yours Sincerely, Leote B. Sprague. But this struck her as an object's position of formality and freedom and she made a third attempt. Yours with love, Leote B. Sprague. This however seemed excessive, as the ladies had never met. And after several other experiments she finally decided on a compromise and ended the note, Yours Sincerely, Mrs. Leote B. Sprague. That might be conventional, Undean reflected, but it was certainly correct. This point settled, she flung open her door, calling imperiously down the passage Celeste, and adding, as the French maid appeared, I wanted to look over all my dinner dresses. Considering the extent of Mrs. Sprague's wardrobe, her dinner dresses were not many. She had ordered a number the year before but, vexed at her lack of use for them, had tossed them over impatiently to the maid. Since then, indeed, she and Mrs. Sprague had succumbed to the abstract pleasure of buying two or three more, simply because they were too exquisite and Undean looked too lovely in them. But she had grown tired of these also, tired of seeing them hang unworn in her wardrobe like so many derisive points of interrogation. And now, as Celeste spread them out on the bed, they seemed disgustingly commonplace and as familiar as if she had danced them to shreds. Nevertheless, she yielded to the maid's persuasions and tried them on. The first and second did not gain by prolonged inspection. They looked old-fashioned already. It's something about the sleeves, Undean grumbled as she threw them aside. The third was certainly the prettiest but then it was the one she had worn at the hotel dance the night before and the impossibility of wearing it again within the week was too obvious for discussion. Yet she enjoyed looking at herself in it for it reminded her of her sparkling passages with Claude Walsingham-Popple and her quieter more fruitful talk with his little friend, the young man she had hardly noticed. You can go, Celeste. I'll take off the dress myself, she said, and when Celeste had passed out laden with discarded finery, Undean bolted her door, dragged the tall, pure glass forward and rummaging in a drawer for fan and gloves, swept to a seat before the mirror with the air of a lady arriving in an evening party. Celeste, before leaving, had drawn down the blinds and turned on the electric light and the white and gold room with its blazing wall brackets formed a sufficiently brilliant background to carry out the illusion. So intemperative glare would have been destructive to all halftones and subtleties of modelling but Undean's beauty was as vivid and almost as crude as the brightness effusing it. Her black brows, her reddish tawny hair and the pure red and white of her complexion defied the searching, decomposing radiance. She might have been some fabled creature whose home was in a beam of light. Undean, as a child, had taken but a lukewarm interest in the diversions of her playmates. Even in the early days when she had lived with her parents in a ragged out skirt of apex and hung on the fence with Indiana Frisk, the freckled daughter of the plumber across the way, she had cared little for dolls or skipping ropes and still less for the riotous games in which the loud Indiana played Atlanta to all the boyhood of the quarter. Already Undean's chief delight was to look up in her mother's Sunday skirt and play Lady before the wardrobe mirror. The taste had outlasted childhood and she still practiced the same secret pantomime, gliding in, settling her skirts, swaying her fan, moving her lips in soundless talk and laughter. But lately she had shrunk from everything that reminded her of her baffled social yearnings. Now, however, she could yield without afterthought to the joy of dramatizing her beauty. Within a few days she would be enacting the scene she was now mimicking and it amused her to see in advance just what impression she would produce on Mrs. Fairford's guests. For a while she carried on her chat with an imaginary circle of admirers twisting this way and that, fanning, fidgeting, twitching at her draperies as she did in real life when people were noticing her. Her incessant movements were not the result of shyness, she thought it the correct thing to be animated in society and noise and restlessness were her only way. She therefore washed herself approvingly, admiring the light on her hair, the flash of teeth between her smiling lips, the pure shadow of her throat and shoulders as she passed from one attitude to another. Only one fact disturbed her. There was a hint of too much fullness in the curves of her neck and in the spring of her hips. She was tall enough to carry off a little extra weight, but excessive slimness was the fashion and she shuddered at the thought that she might someday deviate from the character. Presently she ceased to twist and sparkle at her image and, sinking into her chair, gave herself up to retrospection. She was vexed in looking back to think how little notice she had taken of young Marvel, who turned out to be so much less negligible than his brilliant friend. She remembered thinking him rather shy, less accustomed to society, and though in his quiet, deprecating way he had said one or two droll things, he lacked Mr. Popple's masterly manner, his domineering yet caressing address. When Mr. Popple had fixed his black eyes on Undine and murmured something artistic about the color of her hair, she had thrilled to the depth therefor being. Even now it seemed incredible that he should not turn out to be more distinguished than young Marvel. He seemed so much more in the key of the world she read about in the Sunday papers, the dazzling, oriferous world of the Vandegans, the Driscals, and their peers. She was roused by the sound in the hall of her mother's last words to Mrs. Heaney. Undine waited till their adieu were over, then, opening her door, she seized the astonished masseuse and dragged her into the room. Mrs. Heaney gazed in admiration at the luminous apparition in whose hold she found herself. Mercy, Undine, you do look stunning. Are you trying on your dress for Mrs. Fairford's? Yes. No. This is only an old thing. The girl's eyes glittered under their eyes. Mrs. Heaney, you've got to tell me the truth. Are they as swell as you said? Who, the Fairfords and Marvels? If they ain't swell enough for you, Undine's brag, you'd better go right over to the Court of England. Undine straightened herself. I want the best. Are they as swell as the Driscals and Vandegans? Mrs. Heaney sounded a scornful laugh. Look at here now, you unbelieving girl. As sure as I'm standing here before you, I've seen Mrs. Harmon laying in her pink velvet bed with Huntington lace sheets on it and crying her eyes out because she couldn't get asked to one of Mrs. Parle Marvel's musicals. She'd never dreamt of being asked to dinner there. Not all of her money couldn't have bought her that and she knows it. Undine stood for a moment with bright cheeks and parted lips. Then she flung her soft arms around the masseuse. Oh, Mrs. Heaney, you're lovely to me. She breathed. She looked at her lips on Mrs. Heaney's rusty veil while the latter, freeing herself with a good-natured laugh, said as she turned away, go steady, Undine, and you'll get anywheres. Go steady, Undine. Yes, that was the advice she needed. Sometimes in her dark moods she blamed her parents for not having given it to her. She was so young and they had told her so little. As she looked back, she shuddered some of her escapes. When she came to New York, she had been on the verge of one or two perilous adventures and there had been a moment during their first winter that she had actually engaged herself to the handsome Austrian riding master who accompanied her in the park. He had carelessly shown her a card case with a cornet and had confided in her that he had been forced to resign from a crack cavalry regiment fighting a duel about a countess and as a result of these confidences she wrote on him her pink pearl ring in exchange for one of twisted silver which he said the countess had given him on her deathbed with the request that he should never take it off till he met a woman more beautiful than herself. Soon afterward, luckily, Undine had run across Mabel Lipscomb whom she had known at a Middle Western boarding school as Mabel Blitch. Miss Blitch occupied a position of distinction as the only New York girl at the school and for a time there had been a sharp rivalry for her favor between Undine and Indiana Frusk whose parents had somehow contrived for one term to obtain her admission to the same establishment. In spite of Indiana's unscrupulous methods and of a certain violent way she had of capturing attention, the victory remained with Undine whom Mabel pronounced more refined and the disconfident Indiana denouncing her schoolmates as a bunch of mushes had disappeared forever from the scene of her defeat. Since then, Mabel had returned to New York and married a stockbroker and Undine's first steps in social enlightenment dated from the day when she had met Mrs. Harry Lipscomb and had been taken again under her wing. Harry Lipscomb had insisted on investigating the writing master's record and had found that his real name was Aronson and that he had left Cracow under a charge of swindling servant girls out of their savings. In the light of which discoveries Undine noticed for the first time that his lips were too red and that his hair was pomaded. That was one of the episodes that sickened her as she looked back and made her resolve once more to trust less to her impulses especially in the matter of giving away rings. In the interval however she felt she had learned a good deal especially since by Mabel Lipscomb's advice the Spragues had moved to the Stentorian where that lady was herself established. There was nothing of the monopolist about Mabel and she lost no time in making Undine free of the Stentorian group and its affiliated branches. A society addicted to days and linked together by membership in countless clubs, mundane, cultural, or earnest. Mabel took Undine to the days and introduced her as a guest to the club meetings where she was supported by the presence of many other guests. My friend, Miss Steger of Phalanx, Georgia, or if the lady were literary, simply my friend, Aura Prance Chettle of Nebraska, you know what Miss Chettle stands for. Some of these reunions took place in the lofty hotels more like a sonorously named fleet of battleships along the upper reaches of the west side. The Olympian, the incandescent, the Ormaloo, while others perhaps the more exclusive were held in the equally lofty but more romantically styled apartment houses. The Parthenon, the Tintern Abbey, or the Lido. Undine's preference was for the worldly parties at which games were played and she returned home laden with prizes in Dutch silver but she was duly impressed by the debating clubs where ladies of local distinction addressed the company from an improvised platform or the members argued on subjects of such imperishable interest as what is charm or the problem novel after which pink lemonade and rainbow sandwiches were consumed amid heated discussion of the ethical aspect of the question. It was all very novel and interesting and at first Undine envied Mabel Lipscomb for having made herself a place in such circles but in time she began to despise her for being content to remain there for it did not take Undine long to learn that introduction to Mabel's set had brought her no nearer to Fifth Avenue. Even in Apex Undine's tender imagination had been nurtured on the feats and gestures of Fifth Avenue. She knew all of New York's golden aristocracy by name and the liniments of its most distinguished science had been made familiar by passionate pouring over the daily press. In Mabel's world she sought in vain for the originals and only now and then caught a tantalizing glimpse of one of their familiars as when Claude Walsing and Popple engaged on the portrait of a lady whom the Lipscomb's described as the wife of a steel magnet, felt at his duty to attend one of his client's tees where it became Mabel's privilege to make his acquaintance and to name to him her friend Miss Sprague. Unsuspected social gradations were thus revealed to the attentive Undine but she was beginning to think that her sad proficiency had been acquired in vain when her hopes were revived by the appearance of Mr. Popple and his friend at the Stentorian dance. She thought she had learned enough to be safe from any risk of repeating the hideous Aronson mistake yet now she saw she had blundered again to distinguish in Claude Walsing and Popple while she almost snubbed his more retiring companion. It was all very puzzling and her perplexity had been further increased by Mrs. Heaney's tale of the great Mrs. Harmon B. Driscoll's despair. Here there too Undine had imagined that the Driscoll and Van Degen clans and their allies held undisputed to serenity over New York society. Mabel Lipscomb thought so too and was given to bragging of her with a Mrs. Spoff who was merely a second cousin of Mrs. Harmon B. Driscoll's. Yet here was she Undine's sprag of apex about to be introduced into an inner circle to which Driscolls and Van Degen's had laid siege in vain. It was enough to make her feel a little dizzy with her triumph to work her up into that state of perilous self-confidence in which all her worst follies had been committed. She stood up and going close to the glass examined the reflection of her bright eyes and glowing cheeks. This time her fears were superfluous. There were to be no more mistakes and no more follies now. She was going to know the right people at last. She was going to get what she wanted. As she stood there smiling in her happy image she heard her father's voice in the room beyond and instantly began to tear off her dress, strip the long gloves from her arms and unpin the rose in her hair. Tossing the fallen finery aside she slipped on a dressing gown or into the drawing room. Mr. Sprague was standing near her mother who sat in a drooping attitude. Her head sunk on her breast as she did when she had one of her turns. He looked up abruptly as Undine entered. Father, his mother told you Mrs. Fairford has asked me to dine. She's Mrs. Paul Marvel's daughter. Mrs. Marvel was a dagonette and they're sweller than anybody. They won't know the Driscolls and Van Degen's. Mr. Sprague surveyed her with humorous fondness. That's so. What do they want to know you for, I wonder? He jeered. Can't imagine unless they think I'll introduce you. She jeered back in the same key. Her arms around his stooping shoulders her shining hair against his cheek. Well, and are you going to? Have you accepted? He took up her joke as she held him pinioned while Mrs. Sprague behind them stirred in her seat with a little moan. Undine threw back her head plunging her eyes in his and pressing so close that to his tired elderly sight her face was a mere bright blur. I want to awfully, she declared but I haven't got a single thing to wear. Mrs. Sprague at this moaned more audibly. Undine, I wouldn't ask Father to buy any more clothes right on top of those last bills. I ain't on top of those last bills yet. I'm way down under them. Mr. Sprague interrupted raising his hands to imprison his daughter's slender wrists. Oh, well, if you want me to look like a scare crow and not get asked again, I've got a dress that'll do perfectly. Undine threatened in a tone between banter and vexation. Mr. Sprague held her away at arm's length, a smile drawing up the loose wrinkles around his eyes. Well, that kind of dress might come in mighty handy on some occasions so I guess you'd better hold on to it for future use and go and select another for this fair for dinner, he said. And before he could finish, he was in her arms again and she was smothering his last word in little cries and kisses. End of Chapter 2 Chapter 3 of The Custom of the Country This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Andrea Mossman The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton Chapter 3 Though she would not for the world have owned it to her parents, Undine was disappointed in the fair for dinner. The house, to begin with, was small and rather shabby. There was no gilding, no lavish diffusion of light, the room they sat in after dinner with its green shaded lamps making faint pools of brightness and its rows of books from floor to ceiling, reminded Undine of the old circulating library at Apex before the new marble building was put up. Then, instead of a gas log or a polished grate with electric bulbs behind ruby glass, there was an old-fashioned wood fire like pictures of Back to the Farm for Christmas. And when the logs fell forward, Mrs. Fairford or her brother had to jump up to push them in place and the ashes scattered over the hearth untitledly. The dinner, too, was disappointing. Undine was too young to take note of culinary details, but she had expected to view the company through a bower of orchids and eat pretty colored entrees and ruffled papers. Instead, there was only a low center dish of ferns and plain roasted and broiled meat that one could recognize as if they'd been dyspeptics on a diet. With all the hints in the Sunday papers she thought it dull of Mrs. Fairford not to have picked up something newer, and as the evening progressed she began to suspect that it wasn't a real dinner party and that they had just asked her in to share what they had when they were alone. But a glance about the table convinced her that Mrs. Fairford could not have meant to treat her other guests so lightly. There were only eight in number, but one was no less a person than young Mrs. Peter Van Degen, the one who had been a dagonette, and the consideration which this young lady, herself one of the choicest ornaments of the society column, displayed toward the rest of the company convinced Undine that they must be more important than they looked. She liked Mrs. Fairford, a small incisive woman with a big nose and good teeth revealed by frequent smiles. In her dowdy black and antiquated ornaments she was not what Undine would have called stylish, but she had a droll kind way which reminded the girl of her father's manner when he was not tired or worried about money. One of the other ladies, having white hair, did not long arrest Undine's attention, and the fourth, a girl like herself who was introduced as Miss Harriet Ray, she dismissed at a glance as plain and wearing a last year's model. The men, too, were less striking than she had hoped. She had not expected much of Mr. Fairford since married men were intrinsically uninteresting and his baldness and gray mustache seemed naturally to relegate him to the background. But she had looked for some brilliant youths of her own age. In her inmost heart she had looked for Mr. Popple. He was not there, however, and of the other men, one whom they called Mr. Bowen, was hopelessly elderly. She supposed he was the husband of the white-haired lady, and the other two, who seemed to be friends of young Marvels, were both lacking in Claude Walsingham's dash. Undine sat between Mr. Bowen and young Marvel, who struck her as very sweet. It was her word for friendliness. But even shyer than at the hotel dance. Yet she was not sure if he were shy, or if his quietness were only a new kind of self-possession which expressed herself negatively instead of aggressively. Small, well-knit, fair, he sat stroking his slight, blonde moustache, and looking at her with kindly, almost tender eyes. But he left it to his sister and the others to draw her out and fit her into the pattern. Mrs. Fairford talked so well that the girl wondered why Mrs. Heaney had found her lacking in conversation. But though Undine thought silent people awkward, she was not easily impressed by verbal fluency. All the ladies in Apex City were more valuable than Mrs. Fairford and had a larger vocabulary. The difference was that with Mrs. Fairford conversations seemed to be a concert and not a solo. She kept drawing in the others, giving each a turn, beating time for them with her smile and somehow harmonizing and linking together what they said. She took particular pains to give Undine her due part in the performance. But the girl's expansive impulses were always balanced by odd reactions of mistrust and tonight the latter prevailed. She meant to watch and listen without letting herself go very straight and pink, answering promptly but briefly, with the nervous laugh that punctuated all her phrases, saying, I don't care if I do, when her host asked her to try some grapes and I wouldn't wonder when she thought anyone was trying to astonish her. This state of lucidity enabled her to take note of all that was being said. The talk ran more on general questions and less on people than she was used to. But though the allusions to pictures escaped her, she caught and stored up every personal reference and the pink in her cheeks deepened at the random mention of Mr. Popple. Yes, he's doing me. Mrs. Peter Van Degen was saying in her slightly-drawling voice, he's doing everybody this year, you know. As if that were a reason, a dean heard Mrs. Fairford breathe to Mr. Bowen, who replied in the same pitch, it's a Van Degen reason, isn't it? To which Mrs. Fairford shrugged that delightful Popple he paints so exactly as he talks. The white-haired lady took it up. All his portraits seem to proclaim what a gentleman he is and how he fascinates women. They're not pictures of Mrs. or Miss so-and-so, but simply of the impression Popple thinks he's made on them. Mrs. Fairford smiled. I've sometimes thought, she mused, that Mr. Popple must be the only gentleman I know. At least he's the only man who has ever told me that he was a gentleman, and Mr. Popple never fails to mention it. Undine's ear was too well attuned to the national note of irony for her not to perceive that her companions were making sport of the painter. She winced at their banter as if it had been at her own expense, yet it gave her a dizzy sense of being at last in the very strong hold of fashion. Her attention was diverted by hearing Mrs. Van Degen, under cover of the general laugh, say in a low tone to young Marvel, so I wouldn't have had him paint me. Something in her tone made all Undine's perceptions bristle, and she strained her ears for the answer. I think he'll do you capitally. You must let me come and see some day soon. Marvel's tone was always so light, so unemphasized, that she could not be sure if it's being as indifferent as it sounded. She looked down at the fruit on her plate and shot a side glance through her lashes at Mrs. Peter Van Degen. Mrs. Van Degen was neither beautiful nor imposing, just a dark, girlish-looking creature with plenty of eyes and a fidgety, frequent laugh. But she was more elaborately dressed and jeweled than the other ladies, and her elegance and her restlessness made her seem less alien to Undine. She had turned on Marvel a gaze at once pleading and possessive, but whether betokening merely an inherited intimacy, Undine had noticed that they were all more or less cousins, or a more personal feeling, just as the tone of the young man's reply might have expressed the open avowal of good fellowship, or the disguise of a different sentiment. All was blurred and puzzling to the girl in this world of half-lights, half-tones, eliminations and abbreviations, and she felt a violent longing to brush away the cobwebs and assert herself as the dominant figure of the scene. Yet in the drawing-room with the ladies, where Mrs. Fairford came and sat by her, the spirit of caution once more prevailed. She wanted to be noticed, but she dreaded to be patronized, and here again her hostess's gradations of tone were confusing. Mrs. Fairford made no tactless illusions to her being a newcomer in New York. There was nothing as bitter to the girl as that. But her questions as to what pictures had interested Undine at the various exhibitions of the moment and which of the new books she had read were almost as open to suspicion since they had to be answered in a negative. Undine did not even know that there were any pictures to be seen, much less that people went to see them. And she had read no new book, but when the kissing had to stop of which Mrs. Fairford seemed not to have heard. On the theatre they were equally at odds. For while Undine had seen Ullalu 14 times and was wild about Ned Norris in the Soda Water Fountain, she had not heard of the famous Berlin comedians who were performing Shakespeare at the German Theatre and knew only by name the clever American actress to give repertory plays with a good stock company. The conversation was revived for a moment by her recalling that she had seen Sarah Bernhardt in a play she called Leg Long and another which she pronounced Fade, but even this did not carry them far as she had forgotten what both plays were about and had found the actress a good deal older than she expected. Matters were not improved by the return of the men from the smoking room. Henley Fairford replaced his wife with the Queen's side, and since it was unheard of at Apex for a married man to force a society on a young girl, she inferred that the others didn't care to talk to her and that her host and hostess were in league to take her off their hands. This discovery resulted in her holding her vivid head very high and answering I couldn't really say or is that so to all Mr. Fairford's ventures and as these were neither numerous nor striking it was a relief to both and gave the signal for departure. In the hall where young Marvel had managed to proceed her Undine found Mrs. Van Degen putting on her cloak. As she gathered in about her she laid her hand on Marvel's arm. Ralphie, dear, you'll come to the opera with me on Friday we'll dine together first. Peter's got a club dinner. They exchanged what seemed a smile of intelligence and Undine heard the young man accept then Mrs. Van Degen turned to her. Goodbye Miss Sprague I hope you'll come to dine with me too that must be what she was going to say and Undine's heart gave a bound. To see me some afternoon Mrs. Van Degen ended going down the steps to her motor at the door of which a much furred footman waited with more furs on his arm. Undine's face burned as she turned to receive her cloak. When she had drawn it on with haughty deliberation she found Marvel at her side in hat and overcoat and her heart gave a higher bound. He was going to escort her home, of course. This brilliant youth she felt now that he was brilliant who dined alone with married women whom the Van Degen set called Ralphie, dear had really no eyes for anyone but herself and at the thought her lost self complacency flowed back warm through her veins. The street was coated with ice and she had a delicious moment descending the steps on Marvel's arm and holding it fast while they waited for her cab to come up. But when he had helped her in he closed the door and held his hand out over the lowered window. Good-bye, he said, smiling, and she could not help the break of pride in her voice as she faltered out stupidly from the depths of her disillusionment. Oh! Good-bye. End of Chapter 3 Recording by Andrea Mossman Chapter 4 of the Custom of the Country This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.com Please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Katie Gibbany Arkansas March 2008 The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton Chapter 4 Father, you've got to take a box for me at the opera next Friday. From the tone of her voice Undine's parents knew at once that she was nervous. They had counted a great deal on the Fairford dinner as a means of tranquilization and it was a blow to detect signs of the opposite result when, late the next morning, their daughter came dwindling into the sodden splendor of the stentorian breakfast room. The symptoms of Undine's nervousness were unmistakable to Mr. and Mrs. Sprague. They could read the approaching storm in the darkening of her eyes from limpid gray to slate color and in the way her straight black brows met above them and the red curves of her lips narrowed to a parallel line below. Mr. Sprague, having finished the last course of his heterogeneous meal was adjusting his gold eyeglasses for a glance at the paper when Undine trailed down the sumptuous stuffy room where coffee fumes hung perpetually under the emblazoned ceiling and the spongy carpet might have absorbed a year's crumbs without a sweeping. About them sat other pallid families richly dressed and silently eating their way through a bill of fare which seemed to have ransacked the globe for gastronomic incompatibilities and in the middle of the room a knot of equally pallid waiters engaged in languid conversation turned their backs by common consent on the persons they were supposed to serve. Undine, who rose too late to share the family breakfast, usually had her chocolate brought to her in bed by Celeste after the manner described in the articles on A Society Woman's Day which were appearing in Boudoir chat. Her mere appearance in the restaurant therefore prepared her parents for those symptoms of excessive tension which a nearer inspection confirmed and Mr. Sprague folded his paper and hooked his glasses to his waist-cut with the air of a man who prefers to know the worst and have it over. An opera box faltered Mrs. Sprague, pushing aside the bananas and cream with which she had been trying to tempt an appetite too languid for fried liver or crab mayonnaise. A parterre box Undine corrected, ignoring the exclamation and continuing to address herself to her father. Friday's the stylish night and that new tenor's going to sing again in Cavalieria she condescended to explain. That so Mr. Sprague thrust his hands into his waist-cut pockets to tilt his chair till he remembered there was no wall to meet it. He regained his balance and said, wouldn't a couple of good orchestra seats do you? No, they wouldn't, Undine answered with a darkening brow. He looked at her humorously. You invited the whole dinner-party, I suppose? No, no one. Going all alone in a box she was disdainfully silent. I don't suppose you're thinking of taking mother and me. This was so obviously comic that we all laughed, even Mrs. Sprague and Undine went on more mildly. I want to do something for Mabel Lipscomb. Make some return. She's always taking me round and I've never done a thing for her, not a single thing. This appeal to the national belief in the duty of reciprocal treating could not fail of its effect and Mrs. Sprague murmured, she never has, Abner, but Mr. Sprague's brow remained unrelenting. Do you know what a box costs? No, but I suppose you do. Undine returned with unconscious flippancy. I do, that's the trouble. Why won't seats do you? Mabel could buy seats for herself. That's so, interpolated Mrs. Sprague, always the first to succumb to her daughter's arguments. Well, I guess I can't buy a box for her. Undine's face gloomed more deeply. She sat silent, her chocolate thickening in the cup, while one hand almost as much beringed as her mother's, drummed on the crumpled tablecloth. We might as well go straight back to Apex, she breathed at last, between her teeth. Mrs. Sprague cast a frightened glance at her husband. These struggles between two resolute wills always brought on her palpitations and she wished she had her file of digitalis with her. A parterre box costs $125 a night, said Mr. Sprague, transferring a toothpick in a basket pocket. I only wanted once. He looked at her with a quizzical puckering of his crow's feet. You only want most things once, Undine. It was an observation they had made in her earliest youth. Undine never wanted anything long, but she wanted it right off, and until she got it, the house was uninhabitable. I'd a good deal, rather, have a box for the season, she rejoined, and he saw the opening he had given her. She had two ways of getting things out of him against his principles. The tender, weedling way, and the harsh lipped and cold, and he did not know which he dreaded most. As a child they had admired her assertiveness, had made apex ring with their boasts of it, but it had long since cowed Mrs. Sprague, and it was beginning to frighten her husband. Fact is, Undy, he said weakening, I'm a little might strap just this month. Her eyes grew absent-minded and she always did when he alluded to business. That was man's province and what did men go downtown for but to bring back the spoils to their women? She rose abruptly, leaving her parents seated and said more to herself than the others. Think I'll go for a ride. Oh, Undine! fluttered Mrs. Sprague. She always had palpitations when Undine rode, and since the Aronson episode her fears were not confined to what the horse might do. Why don't you take your mother out shopping a little, Mr. Sprague suggested, conscious of the limitation of his resources? Undine made no answer but swept down the room and out of the door ahead of her mother with scorn and anger in every line of her arrogant young back. Mrs. Sprague tottered meekly after her and Mr. Sprague lounged out into the Marble Hall to buy a cigar before taking the subway to his office. Undine went for a ride not because she felt particularly disposed for the exercise but because she wished to discipline her mother. She was almost sure she would get her opera box, but she did not see why she should have to struggle for her rights and she was especially annoyed with Mrs. Sprague for seconding her so half-heartedly. If she and her mother did not hold together in such crises she would have twice the work to do. Undine hated scenes. She was essentially peace-loving and would have preferred to live on terms of unbroken harmony with her parents. But she could not help it if they were unreasonable, ever since she could remember there had been fusses about money yet she and her mother had always got what they wanted apparently without lasting detriment to the family fortunes. It was therefore natural to conclude that there were ample funds to draw upon and that Mr. Sprague's occasional resistances were merely due to an imperfect understanding of what constituted the necessities of life. When she returned from her ride Mrs. Sprague received her as if she had come back from the dead. It was absurd, of course, but Undine was enured to the absurdity of parents. Has Father Telephoned was her first brief question? No, he hasn't yet. Undine's lips tightened but she proceeded deliberately with the removal of her habit. You'd think I'd asked him to buy me the opera house the way he's acting over a single box, she muttered, flinging aside her smartly fitting coat. Mrs. Sprague received the flying garment and smoothed it out on the bed. Neither of the ladies could bear to have their maid about when they were at their toilet and Mrs. Sprague had always performed these ancillary services for Undine. You know, Undy, Father hasn't always got the money in his pocket and the bills have been pretty heavy lately. Father was a rich man for Apex but that's different from being rich in New York. She stood before her daughter looking down on her appealingly. Undine, who had seated herself while she detached her stock and waistcoat, raised her head with an impatient jerk. Why on earth did we ever leave Apex then, she exclaimed. Mrs. Sprague's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awestruck courage till Undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks. She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit while Mrs. Sprague relapsing from temerity to meekness hovered about her with obstructive zeal. If you'd only just let go of my skirt-mother I can unhook it twice as quick myself. Mrs. Sprague drew back understanding that her presence was no longer wanted but on the threshold she paused as if overruled by a stronger influence and said, with a last look at her daughter, didn't meet anybody when you were out, did you, Undy? Undy's brows drew together. She was struggling with her long, patent leather boot. Meet anybody? Do you mean anybody I know? I don't know anybody. I never shall if father can't afford to let me go round with people. The boot was off with a wrench and she flung it violently across the old rose carpet while Mrs. Sprague, turning away to hide a look of inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room. The day wore on. Undyne had meant to go down and tell Mabel Lipscomb about the Fairford dinner, but its aftertaste was flat on her lips. What would it lead to? Nothing as far as she could see. Ralph Marvel had not even asked when he might call and she was ashamed to confess it to Mabel that he had not driven home with her. Suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which Mrs. Fairford had spoken. Perhaps she might meet some of the people she had seen at dinner, from their talk one might have imagined that they spent their lives in picture galleries. The thought reanimated her and she put on her handsomest furs and a hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undyne knew none of the ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement, but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choice or fare. When she reached the art gallery which Mrs. Fairford had named she found it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue and some of the ladies and gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the look which signified social consecration. As Undyne made her way among them she was aware of attracting almost as much notice as in the street and she flung herself into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables while ripples of self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back. Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eyeglass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undyne was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy intended for graceful wrist movements in supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jeweled eyeglass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eyeglass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout, tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand. As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her, she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this grotesque sorry-in-head with eyelids as thick as lips and lips as thick as earlobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated with a huge pearl-transfixing a silken tie. Oh, thank you, she murmured, all gleams and graces while he stood had in hand, saying sociably. The crowd simply awful, isn't it? At the same moment the lady of the eyeglass drifted closer and with a tap of her wand and a careless, Peter, look at this, swept him to the other side of the gallery. Undine's heart was beating excitedly for as he turned away she had identified him. Peter van Degen. Who could he be but young Peter van Degen, the son of the great banker Thurber van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvel's cousin, the hero of Sunday Supplements, the captor of Blue Ribbons at horse shows, of gold cups at motor races, of winning race-horses and crack-sloops, the supreme exponent in short of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the society columns. Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale, protruding eyes had rested on her. It almost consoled her for his wife's indifference. When she reached home she found that she could not remember anything about the pictures she had seen. No message from her father and a reaction of disgust set in of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel. She would probably never meet Peter van Degen again, or if she did run across him in the same accidental way she knew they could not continue their conversation without being introduced. What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the uninvited? Her gloom was not lightened by founding Ralph Marvel's card on the drawing-room table. She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment. It seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance. But as she tossed the card aside her mother said, he was real sorry not to see you. Undine, he sat here nearly an hour. Undine's attention was roused. Sat here all alone? He was out? Yes, but he came up all the same. He asked for me. Asked for you? The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine's feet. A visitor who asked for a girl's mother she stared at Mrs. Sprague with cold incredulity. What makes you think he did? Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out and they said he'd asked for me. Mrs. Sprague let the fact speak for itself. I watched out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation. Undine shrugged her shoulders. It was a mistake, of course. Why on earth did you let him come up? I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undy. This police struck her daughter as not without weight. Well, did he, she asked, drawing out her hat pins and tossing down her hat on the Onyx table. Why, no, he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make out what he was after. Mrs. Sprague was obliged to own. Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. You never can, she murmured, turning away. She stretched herself out mootily on one of the pink and gold sofas and lay there brooding an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Sprague timidly slipped a cushion under her daughter's head and then dissembled herself behind a lace window curtains and sat watching the light spring out down the long street and spread their glittering net across the park. It was one of Mrs. Sprague's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting of New York. Undyne lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to an opera-box, as the past had been so the future would be. And yet, as she often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement, she honestly wanted the best. Her first struggle, after she had ceased to scream for candy or sulk for a new toy, had been to get away from apex in the summer. Her summers, as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and most exasperating in her life. Her earliest had been spent in the yellow frame cottage where she had hung on the fence kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from her boarding school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealy House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The plush parlors and organ-like radiators of the Mealy House had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of lifting the sprags high above the Frusks and making it possible for Undine when she met Indiana in the street or at school to chill her advances by a careless allusion to the splendors of hotel life. But even in such a setting and in spite of the social superiority it implied, the long months of the Middle Western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odors, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house. At school Undine met other girls whose parents took them to the Great Lakes for August. Some even went to California. Others, a bliss ineffable, went east. Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealy House routine, Undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate pencils and drank pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill health. And when she learned that even Indiana Frusk was to go on a month's visit to Buffalo, it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. Her parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the necessity of change and timidly, tentatively they transferred themselves for a month to a staring hotel on a glaring lake. Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic postcards to Indiana and discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond whose husband, a mining engineer had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed Uba mines and the southern visitors dismay, her repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the general bareness and stridency of the scene were a terrible initiation to Undine. There was something still better beyond then, more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her. She once said to herself afterward that it was always her fate to find out just too late about the something beyond. But in this case it was not too late and obstinately, inflexibly she set herself to the task of forcing her parents to take her east the next summer. Yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a Virginia resort where Undine had her first glimpse of more romantic possibilities. Leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain glades and an atmosphere of Christmas Chromo sentimentality that tempered her heart edges a little and gave her glimpses of a more delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled at the door. Undine, after a first mustering of the other girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first till the arrival from Washington of Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and their daughter. Undine was much handsomer than Miss Wincher, but she saw at a glance that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her plainness. She was exasperated, too, by the discovery that Miss Wincher seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but actually unaware of her existence. Listless, long-faced, supercilious, the young lady from Washington set apart reading novels or playing solitaire with her parents as though the huge hotels, loud life of gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. Undine never even succeeded in catching her eye. She always lowered it to her book when the apex beauty trailed past her secluded corner. But one day an acquaintance of the Winchers turned up, a lady from Boston who had come to Virginia on a botanizing tour and from scraps of Miss Wincher's conversation with the newcomer, Undine, straining her ears behind a column of the long veranda, obtained a new glimpse into the unimagined. The Winchers, it appeared, found themselves at Potash Springs merely because a severe illness of Mrs. Wincher's had made it impossible, at the last moment, to move her father from Washington. They had let their house on the North Shore, and as soon as they could leave, this dreadful hole were going to Europe for the autumn. Miss Wincher simply didn't know how she got through the days, though no doubt it was as good as a rust cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have preferred to hire a house, but the whole, if one could believe it, didn't offer one. So they had simply shut themselves off as best they could from the hotel crew. Had her friend, Miss Wincher parenthetically asked, happen to notice the Sunday young men? They were clearer even than the bells they came for, and had escaped the promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a dining-room and picnicking there. With the persimmon-house standards one couldn't describe it in any other way, but luckily the awful place was doing Mama good, and now they nearly served their term. Undine turned sick as she listened, only the evening before she had gone on a buggy ride with a young gentleman from deposit, a dentist's assistant, and had let him kiss her and given him the flower from her hair. She loathed the thought of him now, she loathed all the people about her, and most of all the disdainful Miss Wincher. It enraged her to think the Winchers clasped her with the hotel crew, who awaited their Sunday young men. The place was forever blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed, but thankful parents back to Apex. But Miss Wincher's depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest. She had heard the call of the Atlantic Seaboard, and the next summer found the sprags at Skog Harbor, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of momentum, as she recalled it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare wind beaten in, all shingles without, and blueberry pie within, was exclusive, parochial, Bostonian, and the sprags wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation. The incomprehensible part of it was that every other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly, and most of them all three. In many competition on ordinary lines Undine would have won, as Van Degen said, hands down. But there wasn't. The other guests simply formed a cold, impenetrable group who walked, boated, played golf, and discussed Christian science and the subliminal, unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their rock-bound circle. It was on the day the sprags left Skog Harbor that Undine vowed herself with set lips. I'll never try anything again till I try New York. Now she had gained her point and tried New York, and so far it seemed with no better success. From small things to great, everything went against her. In such hours of self-searching she was ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes. But they exasperated her less than the blunders of her parents. She was sure, for instance, that she had the right tack at last. Yet, just at the moment when her luck seemed about to turn, she was to be thwarted by her father's stupid obstinacy about the opera box. She lay brooding over these things till long after Mrs. Spragg had gone away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o'clock when she heard her father's dragging tread in the hall. She kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her, laying aside and overcoat. Then his steps came close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book. Oh, Father! She sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her fingers twitching for the tickets, but a substantial packet emerged like nothing she had ever seen. She looked at it, hoping, fearing. She beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile continued to tantalize her. Then she closed on him with a rush, smothering his words against her hair. It's for more than one night. Why, it's for every other Friday. Oh, you darling, you darling! she exalted. Mr. Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. That's so? They must have given me the wrong. Then, convicted by her radiant eyes as she swung round on him, I knew you only wanted it once for yourself, Undine, but I thought maybe, off nights, you'd like to send it to your friends. Mrs. Spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this closing pleasantry, came forward as Undine hurried away to dress. Abner, can you really manage it all right? He answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. Don't you fret about that, Leota? I'm bound to have her go round with these people she knows. I want her to be with them all she can. A pause fell between them while Mrs. Spragg looked anxiously into his fagged eyes. You seen Elmer again? No, once was enough, he returned with a scowl like Undine's. Why, you said he couldn't come after her, Abner. No more he can, but what if she was to get nervous and lonesome and want to go after him? Mrs. Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. How'd he look? Just the same, she whispered. No, spruced up. That's what scared me. It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. You look fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach drops right off, she proposed. But he parried this with his unfailing humor. I guess I'm too sick to risk that. He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture familiar to Apex City. I guess Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night. End of Chapter 4 Chapter 5 of the Custom of the Country. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Katie Giveny, Arkansas, March 2008. The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton. She had looked down at them enviously from the balcony. She had looked up at them reverentially from the stalls. But now at last she was on a line with them, among them. She was part of the sacred semi-circle whose privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that the curtain has fallen. As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in the stalls, Undeen felt that quickening of the faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her, to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier, and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light into a mist, a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the scenery, and the movement on the stage were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent. When the curtain fell on the stage, she began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. In all the boxes, cross currents of movement had set in. Groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera glass, completely without being able to name them, fixed figureheads of the social prow, others she recognized from their portraits in the papers. But of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition, not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless. Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have use it. What on earth could the people be doing? What rare or delight could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes and the names of their owners were given on the back of the program, and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen. That was it. The box was empty because Mrs. Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvel. Peter will be at one of his dinners. Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen dining-room. She pictured it as oak, carved, and sumptuous with gilding, with a small table in the center and rosy lights and flowers, and Ralph Marvel across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to take a light from his hostess's cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes on the stage. She had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now. From the ear of jewels on Mrs. Van Degen's bare shoulders to the way young Marvel stroked his slight-blonde mustache while he smiled and listened. Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had been taken by her. That she could ever really count among these happy self-absorbed people. They all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations. Why should they make room for an intruder in this world? As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen dining-room, it became clear to her that fashionable society was horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere. She remembered that an eminent divine was preaching a series of sermons against social corruption and she determined to go and hear him on the following Sunday. This train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being served from the neighboring box. She turned around with the faint of speaking to Mrs. Lipscomb and met the bulging stare of Peter Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eyeglass who had replaced her tortoise shell implement by one of closely set brilliance which, at word from her companion, she critically bent on Undine. No, I don't remember, she said, and the girl reddened, divining herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny. But there was no doubt as to young Van Degen's remembering her. She was even conscious that he was trying to provoke her in some reciprocal sign of recognition and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her program. Why, there's Mr. Popple over there! exclaimed Mabel Lipscomb, making large signs across the house with fan and play-bill. Undine had already become aware that Mabel, planted, blond and blue near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing, and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way, a gestureless mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. Still, Undine could not help following Mrs. Lipscomb's glance and there in fact was Claude Popple taller and more dominant than ever and bending easily over what she saw in the back of a brilliant woman. He replied by a discreet salute to Mrs. Lipscomb's intemperate motions and Undine saw the brilliant woman's opera glass turn in their direction and said to herself that in a moment Mr. Popple would be round. But the entre act wore on and no one turned the handle of their door or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of Harry Lipscomb who, not being, as he put it, on to, grand opera had abandoned the struggle and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. Undine jealously watched Mr. Popple's progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to brilliant woman but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door he reappeared at his original post across the house. Undy, do look! There's Mr. Marvel. Mabel began again with another conspicuous outbreak of signalling and this time Undine flushed to the nape as Mrs. Peter Van Degen appeared in the opposite box with Ralph Marvel behind her. The two seemed to be alone in the box as they had doubtless been alone all the evening and Undine furtively turned to see if Mr. Van Degen shared her disapproval. But Mr. Van Degen had disappeared and Undine, leaning forward, nervously touched Mabel's arm. What's the matter, Undine? Don't you see Mr. Marvel over there? Is that his sister he's with? No, I wouldn't beckon like that, Undine whispered between her teeth. Why not? Don't you want him to know you're here? Yes, but the other people are not beckoning. Mabel looked about unabashed. Perhaps they've all found each other. Shall I send Harry over to tell him? She shouted above the blare of the wind instruments. No gasped Undine as the curtain rose. She was no longer capable of following the action on the stage. Two presences possessed her imagination. That of Ralph Marvel, small, unattainable, remote, and that of Mabel Lipscomb, nearby, immense, and irrepressible. It had become clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side. Mabel, monumental, and molded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous. Mabel strident and explicit they were subdued and elusive. At the Stentorian she was the center of her group. Here she revealed herself as unknown and unknowing. Why, she didn't even know that Mrs. Peter Van Degen was not Ralph Marvel's sister. And she had a way of trumpeting out her ignorances that jarred on Undine's subtler methods. It was precisely at this point that they're dawned on Undine what was to be one of the guiding principles of her career. The curtain fell again and Undine's eyes flew back to the Van Degen box. Several men were entering it together and a moment later she saw Ralph Marvel rise from his seat and pass out. Half unconsciously she placed herself in such a way as to have an eye on the door of the box. But its handle remained unturned and Harry Lipscomb, leaning back on the sofa, his head against the opera cloaks continued to breathe stentorously through his open mouth and stretched his legs a little farther across the threshold. The intraact was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen stumbled over Mr. Lipscomb's legs. The foremost was Claude Walsingham Popple and above his shoulder shone the Bactracian countenance of Peter Van Degen. A brief murmur from Mr. Popple made his companion known to the two ladies and Mr. Van Degen promptly seated himself behind Undeen, relegating the painter to Mrs. Lipscomb's elbow. Queer go! I happened to see your friend there waving to old Pop across the house. So I bolted over and collared him, told him he'd got to introduce me before he was a minute older. I tried to find out who you were the other day at the motor show. No, where was it? Oh, those pictures at Goldmark's. What do you think of them, by the way? You ought to be painted yourself. No, I mean it, you know. And old Pop to do you. He'd do your hair rippingly. You must let me come and talk to you about it. About the picture or your hair? Well, your hair if you don't mind. Where'd you say you were staying? Oh, you live here, do you say? I say, that's first rate. Undeen sat well forward, curving toward him a little, as she had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to the house that she was conversing with no less a person than Mr. Van Degen. Mr. Popple's talk was certainly more brilliant and purposeful, and she saw him cast longing glances at her from behind Mrs. Lipscomb's shoulder. But she remembered how lightly he had been treated at the Fairford dinner, and she wanted—oh, how she wanted— to have Ralph Marvel see her talking to Van Degen. She poured out her heart to him, improvising an opinion on the pictures and an opinion on the music falling in gaily with his suggestion of a jolly little dinner some night soon at the Café Martin and strengthening her position, as she thought, by an easy allusion to her acquaintance with Mrs. Van Degen. But at the word her companions eye clouded, and a shade of constraint dimmed his enterprising smile. My wife? Oh, she doesn't go to restaurants. She moves on too high a plane. But we'll get old Pop. And Mrs.—Mrs. What'd you say your fat friend's name was? Just a select little crowd of four and some kind of a cheerful show afterwards. Jove, there's the curtain and I must skip. As the door closed on him, Undine's cheeks burned with resentment. If Mrs. Van Degen didn't go to restaurants, why had he supposed that she would, and to have to drag Mabel in her wake? The leaden's sense of failure overcame her again. Here was the evening nearly over and what had it led to? Looking up from the stalls she fancied that to sit in a box was to be in society. Now she saw it might but emphasize one's exclusion. And she was burdened with the box for the rest of the season. It was really stupid of her father to have exceeded his instructions. Why had he not done as she told him? Undine felt helpless and tired. Hateful memories of Apex crowded back on her. Was it going to be as dreary here as there? She felt Lipscomb's loud whisper Say you girls, I guess I'll cut this and come back for you when the show buss up. They heard him shuffle out of the box and Mabel settled back to undisturbed enjoyment of the stage. When the last entre act began, Undine stood up, resolved to stay no longer. Mabel, lost in the study of the audience, had not noticed her movement and as she passed alone into the back of the box the door opened and Ralph Marvel came in. Undine stood with one arm listlessly raised to detach her cloak from the wall. Her attitude showed the long slimness of her figure and the fresh curve of the throat below her bent back head. Her face was paler and softer than usual and the eyes she rested on Marvel's face looked deep and starry under their fixed brows. Oh, you're not going! he exclaimed. I thought you weren't coming, she answered simply. I waited till now on purpose to dodge your other visitors. She laughed with pleasure. Oh, we hadn't so many. Some intuition had already told her that frankness was the tone to take with him. They sat down together on the red damask sofa against the hanging cloaks. As Undine leaned back her hair caught in the spangles of the rat behind her and she had to sit motionless while the young man freed the captive mesh. Then they settled themselves again laughing a little at the incident. A glance had made the situation clear to Mrs. Lipscomb and they saw her return to her wrapped inspection of the boxes. In their mirror-hung recess the light was subdued to a rosy dimness and the hum of the audience came to them through half-drawn silken curtains. Undine noticed the delicacy and finish of her companion's features as his head detached itself against the red silk walls. The hand with which he stroked his small moustache was finally finished too but sinewy and not effeminate. She had always associated finish and refinement entirely with her own sex but she began to think they might be even more agreeable in a man. Marvel's eyes were grey like her own with chestnut eyebrows and darker lashes and his skin was as clear as a woman's but pleasantly reddish like his hands. As he sat talking in a low tone questioning her about the music asking her what she had been doing since he had last seen her she was aware that he looked at her less than usual and she also glanced away but when she turned her eyes suddenly they always met his gaze. His talk remained impersonal. She was a little disappointed that he did not compliment her on her dress or her hair. Undine was accustomed to hearing a great deal about her hair and the episode of the Spangles had opened the way to a graceful illusion but the instinct of sex under his quiet words he was throbbing with the sense of her proximity and his self restraint sobered her made her refrain from the flashing and fidgeting which were the only way she knew of taking part in the immemorial love dance. She talked simply and frankly of herself, of her parents of how few people they knew in New York and of how, at times she was almost sorry she had persuaded them to give up apex. You see, they did it entirely on my account. They're awfully lonesome here and I don't believe I shall ever learn New York ways either she confessed turning on him the eyes of youth and truthfulness. Of course I know a few people but they're not not the way I expected New York people to be. She risked what seemed an involuntary glance at Mabel. I've seen girls here tonight that I just long to know they look so lovely and refined but I don't suppose I ever shall work's not very friendly to strange girls, is it? I suppose you've got so many of your own already and they're also fascinating you don't care. As she spoke she let her eyes rest on his half laughing, half wistful and then dropped her lashes while the pink stole slowly up to them. When he left her he asked if he might hope to find her at home the next day. The night was fine and Marvel, having put his cousin into her motor, started to walk home to Washington Square. At the corner he was joined by Mr. Popple. Hello, Ralph old man. Did you run across our auburn beauty of the Stentorian? Who'd have thought old Harry Lipscomb'd have put us on to anything as good as that? Peter Van Degen was fairly taken off his feet, pulled me out of Mrs. Monty Thurber's box and dragged me round by the collar to introduce him. Planning a dinner at Martin's already. Gad, young Peter must have what he wants when he wants it. I put in a word for you. I told him you and I ought to be let in on the ground floor. Funny the luck some girls have about getting started. I believe this one'll take if she can manage to shake the Lipscomb's. I think I'll ask to paint her. Might be a good thing for the spring show. She'd show up splendidly as a pendant to my Mrs. Van Degen. Blonde and brunette, night and morning. Of course I'd prefer Mrs. Van Degen's type. Personally I must have breeding. But as a mere bit of flesh and blood. Hello, ain't you coming into the club? Marvel was not coming into the club and he drew a long breath of relief as his companion left him. Was it possible that he had ever thought leniently of the egregious Popple, the tone of social omniscience which he had once found so comic was now as offensive to him as a coarse physical touch? And the worst of it was that Popple, with the slight exaggeration of a caricature, really expressed the ideals of the world he frequented. As he spoke of Miss Sprague, so others at any rate would think of her. Almost everyone in Ralph's set would agree that it was luck for a girl from Apex to be started by Peter Van Degen at a café Martin Dinner. Ralph Marvel, mounting his grandfather's doorstep, looked up at the symmetrical old red house-front with its frugal marble ornament as he might have looked into a familiar human face. They're right, after all, in some ways they're right, he murmured, slipping his key into the door. They were his mother and old Mr. Urban Dagonette, both from Ralph's earliest memories, so closely identified with the old house in Washington Square that they might have passed for its inner consciousness as it might have stood for their outward form. And the question as to which the house now seemed to affirm their intrinsic rightness was that of the social disintegration expressed by widely different architectural physiognomies at the other end of Fifth Avenue. As Ralph pushed the bolts behind him and passed into the hall with its dark mahogany doors and the quiet Dutch interior effect of its black and white marble paving, he said to himself that what Popple called society was really just like the house it lived in, a muddle of misapplied ornament over a thin steel shell of utility. The steel shell was built up in Wall Street, the social trimmings were hastily added in Fifth Avenue, and the union between them was as monstrous and factitious as unlike the gradual homogenous growth which flowers into what other countries knew as society as that between the Blois gargoyles on Peter Van Degen's roof and the skeleton walls supporting them. That was what they had always said, what at least the Dagonette attitude, the Dagonette view of life, the very lines of the furniture of the old Dagonette house expressed. Ralph sometimes called his mother and grandfather the Aborigines and likened them to those vanishing denizens of the American continent doomed to rapid extinction with the advance of the invading race. He was fond of describing Washington Square as the reservation and of prophesying that before long its inhabitants would be exhibited at ethnological shows pathetically engaged in the exercise of primitive industries. Small, cautious, middle-class had been the ideals of Aboriginal New York, but it suddenly struck the young man that they were singularly coherent and respectable as contrasted with the chaos of indiscriminate appetites which made up its modern tendencies. He too had wanted to be modern, had revolted half humorously against the restrictions and exclusions of the old code, and it must have been one of the ironic reversions of heredity that, at this precise point, he began to see what there was to be said on the other side, his side, as he now felt it to be. End of Chapter 5 CHAPTER VI OF THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Elizabeth Klett The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton CHAPTER VI Upstairs in his brown, fire-lit room he threw himself into an arm-chair and remembered Harvard first, then Oxford, then a year of wandering and rich initiation. Returning to New York he had read law and now had his desk in the office of the respectable firm in whose charge the stagnant estate had moldered for several generations. But his profession was the least real thing in his life. The realities lay about him now. The books jamming his old college bookcases and overflowing on chairs and tables. Sketches, too. He could do charming things if only he had known how to finish them. And on the writing-table at his elbow scattered sheets of prose and verse. Charming things also, but like the sketches, unfinished. Nothing in the Dagonit and Marvell tradition was opposed to this desultory dabbling with life. For four or five generations it had been the rule of both houses that a young fellow should go to Columbia or Harvard, read law, and then lapse into more or less cultivated inaction. The only essential was that he should live like a gentleman. That is, with a tranquil disdain for mere money-getting, a passive openness to the finer sensations, one or two fixed principles as to the quality of wine, and an archaic probity that had not yet learned to distinguish between private and business honour. No equipment could more thoroughly have unfitted the modern youth for getting on. It hardly needed the scribbled pages on the desk to complete the hopelessness of Ralph Marvell's case. He had accepted the fact with a humorous fatalism. Material resources were limited on both sides of the house, but there would always be enough for his frugal wants, enough to buy books, not editions, and pay now and then for a holiday dash to the great centres of art and ideas. And meanwhile there was the world of wonders within him. As a boy at the seaside, Ralph, between tides, had once come on a cave, a secret inaccessible place with glockis lights, mysterious murmurs, and a single shaft of communication with the sky. He had kept his find from the other boys, not churlishly, for he was always an outspoken lad, but because he felt there were things about the cave that the others, good fellows as they all were, couldn't be expected to understand, and that anyhow would never be quite his cave again after he had let his thick-set freckled cousins play smuggler and pirate in it. And so with his inner world. Though so coloured by outer impressions it wove a secret curtain about him, and he came and went in it with the same joy of furtive possession. One day, of course, someone would discover it and reign there with him. No, reign over it and him. Once or twice already a light foot had reached the threshold. His cousin, Claire Dagonet, for instance. There had been a summer when her voice had sounded far down the windings, but he had run over to Spain for the autumn and when he came back she was engaged to Peter Van Degen, and for a while it looked black in the cave. That was long ago, as time has reckoned under thirty, and for three years now he had felt for her only a half-contemptuous pity, to have stood at the mouth of his cave and have turned from it to the Van Degen lair. Poor Claire repented indeed. She wanted it clearly, but she repented in the Van Degen diamonds, and the Van Degen motor bore her broken heart from opera to ball. She had been subdued to what she worked in, and she could never again find her way to the enchanted cave. Ralph, since then, had reached the point of deciding that he would never marry, reached it not suddenly or dramatically, but with such sober advisedness as is urged on those about to take the opposite step. What he most wanted, now that the first flutter of being was over, was to learn and to do, to know what the great people had thought, think about their thinking, and launch his own boat. Write some good verse, if possible, if not, then critical prose. A dramatic poem lay among the stuff at his elbow, but the prose critic was at his elbow too, and not to be satisfied about the poem. And poet and critic passed the nights in hot, if unproductive, debate. On the whole it seemed likely that the critic would win the day, and the essay on the rhythmical structures of Walt Whitman takes shape before the banished god. Yet if the light in the cave was less supernaturally blue, the chant of its tides less laden with unimaginable music, it was still a thronged and echoing place when Undean Sprag appeared on its threshold. His mother and sister, of course, wanted him to marry. They had the usual theory that he was made for conjugal bliss. Women always thought that of a fellow who didn't get drunk and have low tastes. Ralph smiled at the idea as he sat crouched among his secret treasures. Mary, but whom in the name of light and freedom? The daughters of his own race sold themselves to the invaders. The daughters of the invaders bought their husbands as they bought an opera box. It ought all to have been transacted on the stock exchange. His mother, he knew, had no such ambitions for him. She would have liked him to fancy a nice girl like Harriet Ray. She was vulgar, nor ambitious. She regarded Washington Square as the birthplace of society. Knew by heart all the cousin ships of early New York, hated motor-cars could not make herself understood on the telephone, and was determined if she married, never to receive a divorced woman. As Mrs. Marvell often said, such girls as Harriet were growing rare. Ralph was not sure about this. He was inclined to think that Mrs. Marvell was allowed for. There would always be plenty of Harriet Ray's for unworldly mothers to commend to their sons, and he had no desire to diminish their number by removing one from the ranks of the marriageable. He had no desire to marry at all. That had been the whole truth of it till he met on Dean Sprague. And now? He lit a cigar and began to recall his hour's conversation with Mrs. Sprague. Ralph had never taken his mother's social faiths very seriously. Maying the march of civilization from a loftier angle, he had early mingled with the invaders, and curiously observed their rights and customs. But most of those he had met had already been modified by contact with the indigenous. They spoke the same language as his, though on their lips it had often so different a meaning. Ralph had never seen them actually in the making, before they had acquired the speech of the conquered race. But Mrs. Sprague still used the dialect of her people, and before the end of the visit Ralph had ceased to regret that her daughter was out. He felt obscurely that in the girl's presence, frank and simple as he thought her, he should have learned less of life in early apex. Mrs. Sprague once reconciled, or at least resigned, to the mysterious necessity of having to entertain a friend of Undean's, had yielded the first touch on the weak springs of her garrulity. She had not seen Mrs. Heaney for two days, and this friendly young man with a gentle manner was almost as easy to talk to as the masseuse. And then she could tell him things that Mrs. Heaney already knew, and Mrs. Sprague liked to repeat her stories. To do so gave her almost her soul sense of permanence among the shifting scenes of life. So that, after she had lengthily deplored the untoward accident of Undean's absence, and her visitor, with a smile, and echoes of du verre étendoyant in his brain, had repeated her daughter's name after saying, It's a wonderful find. How could I tell you it would be such a fit? It came to her quite easily to answer. Why, we called her after a hair-waver father put on the mark at the week she was born. And then to explain, as he remained struck and silent. It's from Undeley, you know, the French for crimping. Father always thought the name made it take. He was quite a scholar, and had the greatest knack for finding names. I remember the time he invented his life glue he sat up all night over the Bible to get the name. No, father didn't start in as a drugist. She went on, expanding with the signs of Marbell's interest. He was educated for an undertaker and built up a first-class business. But he was always a beautiful speaker, and after a while he sort of drifted into the ministry. Of course it didn't pay him anything like as well, so finally he opened a drugstore, and he did first rate at that, too, though his heart was always in the pulpit. After he made such a success with his hair-waver he got speculating and land out at Apex, and somehow everything went, though Mr. Sprague did all he could. Mrs. Sprague, when she found herself embarked on a long sentence, always ballasted it by italicizing the last word. Her husband, she continued, could not, at the time, do much for his father-in-law. Mr. Sprague had come to Apex as a poor boy, and their early married life had been a struggle, darkened by domestic affliction. Two of their three children had died of typhoid in the epidemic which devastated Apex before the new waterworks were built, and this calamity, by causing Mr. Sprague to resolve that thereafter Apex should drink pure water, had led directly to the founding of his fortunes. He had taken over some of poor father's land for a bad debt, and when he got up the pure water move the company voted to buy the land again to be better off, and it did seem as if it had come out so to comfort us some about the children. Mr. Sprague thereafter had begun to be a power in Apex, and fat years had followed on the lean. Ralph Marvell was too little versed in affairs to read between the lines of Mrs. Sprague's untutored narrative, and he understood no more than she the occult connection between Mr. Sprague's domestic misfortunes and his business triumph. Mr. Sprague had helped out his father-in-law, and had vowed on his children's graves that no Apex child should ever again drink poisoned water, and out of those two disinterested impulses, by some impressive law of compensation, material prosperity had come. What Ralph understood and appreciated was Mrs. Sprague's unaffected frankness in talking of her early life. Here was no retrospective pretense of an opulent past, such as the other invaders were given to parading before the bland but reject race. The Spragues had been plain people, and had not yet learned to be shamed of it. The fact drew them much closer to the Dagonite ideals than any sham elegance in the past tense. Ralph felt that his mother, who shuddered away from Mrs. Harmon B. Driscoll, would understand an esteem Mrs. Sprague. But how long would their virgin innocence last? People's vulgar hands were on it already. People's and the unspeakable Vandegans. Once they and theirs had begun the process of initiating on Dean there was no knowing, or rather there was too easy knowing, how it would end. It was incredible that she too should be destined to swell the ranks of the cheaply fashionable. Yet were not her very freshness, her malleability the mark of her fate. She was still at the age when the flexible soul offers itself to the first grasp. That the grasp should chance to be Vandegans, that was what made Ralph's temples buzz, and swept away all his plans for his future like a beaver's dam in a spring flood. To save her from Vandegan and Vandeganism, was that really to be his mission? The call for which his life had obscurely waited? It was not in the least what he had meant to do with the fugitive flash of consciousness he called self. But all that he had purposed for that transitory being sank into insignificance under the pressure of Undean's claims. Ralph Marvell's notion of women had been formed on the experiences common to good-looking young men of his kind. Women were drawn to him as much by his winning appealing quality by the sense of a youthful warmth behind his light ironic exterior, as by his charms of face and mind. Except during Claire Dagonet's brief reign the depths in him had not been stirred. But in taking what each sentimental episode had to give, he had preserved, through all his minor adventures, his faith in the great adventure to come. It was this faith that made him so easy a victim when love had at last appeared clad in the attributes of romance, the imaginative man's indestructible dream of a rounded passion. The clearness with which he judged the girl and himself seemed the surest proof that his feeling was more than a surface thrill. He was not blind to her crudity and her limitations. But they were a part of her grace and her persuasion. So he had seen her from the first. But was not that merely the sign of a quicker response to the world's manifold appeal? There was Harriet Ray, sealed up tight in the vacuum of inherited opinion, where not a breath of fresh sensation could get at her. There could be no call to rescue young ladies so secured from the perils of reality. Undine had no such traditional safeguards. Ralph guessed Mrs. Bragg's opinions to be as fluid as her daughter's, and the girl's very sensitiveness to new impressions, combined with her obvious lack of any sense of relative values, would make her an easy prey to the powers of folly. He seemed to see her, as he sat there pressing his fists into his temples. He seemed to see her like a lovely rock-bound andromeda with the devouring monster society careering up to make a mouthful of her, and himself whirling down on his winged horse. Just Pegasus turned Rosinante for the naunts to cut her bonds, snatch her up, and whirl her back into the blue. End of chapter 6