 21 The Spring in New York proceeded through more than its usual extremes of temperature to the threshold of a sultry dune. Ralph Marvel, barely bent to his task, felt the fantastic humours of the weather as only one more incoherence in the general chaos of his case. It was strange enough, after four years of marriage, to find himself again in his old brown room in Washington Square. It was hardly there that he'd expected Pegasus to land him, and, like a man returning to the scenes of his childhood, he found everything on a much smaller scale than he had imagined. Had the decanate boundaries really narrowed, or had the breach in the walls of his own life let in a wider vision? Certainly there had come to be other differences between his present and his former self than that embodied in the presence of his little boy in the next room. Paul, in fact, was now the chief link between Ralph and his past. Concerning his son, he still felt, and thought, in a general way, in the terms of the decanate tradition. He still wanted to implant in Paul some of the reserves and discriminations which divided that tradition from the new spirit of limitless concession. But for himself it was different. Since his transaction with Moffat he had had the sense of living under a new dispensation. He was not sure that it was any worse than the other, but then he was no longer very sure about anything. Perhaps this growing indifference was merely the reaction from a long, nervous strain, that his mother and sister thought it so, was shown by the way in which they mutely watched and hovered. Their discretion was like the hushed tread about a sick bed. They permitted themselves no criticism of Undine. He was asked no awkward questions, subjected to no ill-timed sympathy. They simply took him back, on his own terms, into the life he had left them to, and their silence had none of those subtle implications of disapproval which may be so much more wounding than speech. For a while he received a weekly letter from Undine. Vague and disappointing though they were, these missives helped him through the days. But he looked forward to them rather as a pretext for replies than for their actual contents. Undine was never at a loss for the spoken word. Ralph had often wandered at a verbal range and her fluent use of terms outside the current vocabulary. She'd certainly not picked these up in books since she never opened one. They seemed rather like some odd transmission of her preaching grandparents' oratory. But in her brief and colourless letters she repeated the same bold statements in the same few terms. She was well. She had been around with Berther Schellam. She had dined with the Jim Juskles or Mae Berenger or Dickie Bowles. The weather was too lovely or too awful. Such was the gist of her news. On the last page she hoped Paul was well and sent him a kiss. But she never made a suggestion concerning his care or asked a question about a pursuit. One could only infer that knowing in what good hands he was she judged such solicitude superfluous, and it was thus that Ralph put the matter to his mother. Of course she's not worrying about the boy. Why should she? She knows that with you and Laura he's as happy as a king. To which Mrs. Marvel would answer gravely. When you write, be sure to say I shan't put on his thinner flannels as long as his east wind lasts. As for her husband's welfare, Undine's sole allusion to it consisted in the invariable expression of the hope that he was getting along all right. The phrase was always the same, and Ralph learned to know just how far down the third page to look for it. In a post-script she sometimes asked him to tell her mother about a new way of doing hair or cutting a skirt, and this was usually the most eloquent passage of the letter. What satisfaction he extracted from these communications he would have found it hard to say. Yet when they did not come he missed them hardly less than if they had given him all he craved. Sometimes the mere act of holding the blue or mauve sheet and breathing its scent was like holding his wife's hand and being enveloped in her fresh young fragrance. The sentimental disappointment vanished in the penetrating physical sensation. In other moods it was enough to trace the letters of the first line and the last for the desert of perfunctory phrases between the two to vanish, leaving only the vision of their interlaced names as of a mystic bond which her own hand had tied. Or else he saw her closely, palpably before him, as she sat at her writing table, frowning in a little flushed, her bent nape showing the light on her hair, her short lip pulled up by the effort of composition, and this picture had the violent reality of dream images on the verge of waking. At other times, as he read her letter, he felt simply that at least in the moment of writing it, she had been with him. But in one of the last, she said, to excuse a bad blot and an incoherent sentence, everybody's talking to me at once, and I don't know what I'm writing. That letter he had thrown into the fire. After the first few weeks, the letters came less and less regularly. At the end of two months they seized. Ralph had gotten to the habit of watching for them on the days when a foreign post was due, and as the weeks went by without a sign, he began to invent excuses for leaving the office earlier, and hurrying back to Washten Square to search the letterbox for a big tinted envelope with a straggling, blotted superscription. Undine's departure had given him a momentary sense of liberation. At that stage in their relations any change would have brought relief. But now that she was gone, he knew she could never really go. Though his feeling for her had changed, it still ruled his life. If he saw her in her weakness, he felt her in her power, the power of youth and physical radiance that clung to his disenchanted memories as a scent she used clung to her letters. Looking back at their four years of marriage, he began to ask himself if he had done all he could to draw her half-formed spirit from its sleep. Had he not expected too much at first and grown too indifferent in the sequel? After all, she was still in the toy age, and perhaps the very extravagance of his love had retarded her growth, helped to imprison her in a little circle of frivolous illusions. But the last months had made a man of him, and when she came back he would know how to lift her to the height of his experience. So he would reason, day by day, as he hastened back to Washten Square. But when he opened the door and his first glance at the whole table showed him there was no letter there, his illusions shriveled down to their weak roots. She had not written. She did not mean to write. He and the boy were no longer a part of her life. When she came back everything would be as it had been before, with a dreary difference that she had tasted new pleasures and that their absence would take the savor from all yet to given. Then the coming of another foreign male would lift his hopes, and as he hurried home he would imagine new reasons for expecting a letter. Week after week he swung between the extremes of hope and ejection, and at last when the strain had become unbearable he cabled her. The answer ran, very well, best love writing. But the promised letter never came. He went on steadily with his work. He even passed through a phase of exaggerated energy, but as baffled youth fought in him for air. Was this to be the end? Was he to wear his life out in useless drudgery? The plain prose of it, of course, was that the economic situation remained unchanged by the sentimental catastrophe and that he must go on working for his wife and child. But at any rate, as it was mainly for Paul that he would henceforth work, it should be on his own terms and according to his inherited notions of straightness. He would never again engage in any transaction resembling his compact with moffat. Even now he was not sure there had been anything crooked in that, but the fact of his having instinctively referred the point to Mr. Sprague, rather than to his grandfather, implied a presumption against it. His partners were quick to profit by his sudden spurred of energy, and his work grew no lighter. He was not only the youngest and most recent member of the firm, but the one who had so far added least to the volume of its business. His hours were the longest, his absences, as summer approached, the least frequent and the most grudgingly accorded. No doubt his associates knew that he was pressed for money and could not risk a break. They worked him, and he was aware of it, and submitted because he dared not lose his job. But the long hours of mechanical drudgery were telling on his active body and undisciplined nerves. He began too late to subject himself to the persistent mortification of spirit and flesh which is a condition of the average business life. And after the long, dull days in the office, the evenings at his grandfather's wist table did not give him the counter-stimulus he needed. Almost everyone had gone out of town. But now and then Miss Ray came to dine, and Ralph, seated beneath the family portraits and opposite the desiccated Harriet, who had already faded to the semblance of one of her own great aunts, listened languidly to the kind of talk that the originals might have exchanged about the same table when New York gentility centered in the battery and the bowling green. Mr. Dagonet was always pleasant to see and hear, but his sarcasms were growing faint and recondite. They had as little bearing on life as the humours of a restoration comedy. As for Mrs. Marvel and Miss Ray, they seemed to the young man even more spectrally remote. Hardly anything that mattered to him existed for them, and their prejudices reminded him of signposts warning off trespasses who have long since ceased to intrude. Now and then he dined at his club and went on to the theatre with some young man of his own age, but he left them afterward, half vexed with himself for not being in the humour to prolong the adventure. There were moments when he would have liked to affirm his freedom in however common plays away, moments when the vulgarest way would have seemed the most satisfying. But he always ended by walking home alone and tiptoeing upstairs through the sleeping house, lest he should wake his boy. On Saturday afternoons, when the business world was hurrying to the country for golf and tennis, he stayed in town and took Paul to see the sprigs. Several times since his wife's departure he had tried to bring about closer relations between his own family and Undines, and the ladies of Washington Square and their eagerness to meet his wishes had made various friendly advances to Mrs. Sprague. But they were met by a mute resistance, which made Ralph suspect that Undine's strictures on his family had taken root in her mother's brooding mind, and he gave up the struggle to bring together what had been so effectually put to Sunday. If he regretted his lack of success, it was chiefly because he was so sorry for the sprigs. Soon after Undine's marriage they had abandoned their polychromes suite at the Centaurium, and since then their peregrinations had carried them through half the hotels with the metropolis. Undine, who had early discovered her mistake in thinking hotel life fashionable, had tried to persuade her parents to take a house of their own. But though they were framed from texting her with inconsistency, they did not act on our suggestion. Mrs. Sprague seemed to shrink from the thought of going back to housekeeping, and Ralph suspected that she depended on the transit from hotel to hotel as the one element of variety in our life. As for Mr. Sprague, it was impossible to imagine anyone in whom the domestic sentiments were more completely unlocalized and disconnected from any fixed habits, and he was probably aware of his changes of a boat chiefly as they obliged him to ascend from the subway, or descent from the elevated, a few blocks higher up or lower down. Neither husband nor wife complained to Ralph of their frequent displacements, or assigned to them any cause save the vague one of guessing they could do better. But Ralph noticed that the decreasing luxury of their life synchronized with Undine's growing demands for money. During the last few months, they'd transferred themselves to the mellopran, a tall, narrow structure resembling a grain elevator divided into cells, where Lenolium and Lincrusta simulated the stucco and marble of the Stentorian. In fact, businessmen and their families consumed the waterous tubes dispensed by coloured help in the grey twilight of a basement dining room. Mrs. Sprague had no sitting room, and Paul and his father had to be received in one of the long public parlours between ladies seated at rickety desks in the throes of correspondence and groups of listlessly conversing residents and colas. The Spragues were intensely proud of their grandson, and Ralph perceived that they would have liked to see Paul charging up roriously from group to group and thrusting his bright curls and cherubic smile upon the general attention, the fact that the boy preferred to stand between his grandfather's knees and play with Mrs. Sprague's masonic emblem, or dangle his legs from the arms of Mrs. Sprague's chair, seemed to his grandparents evidence of ill health or undue repression, and he was subjected by Mrs. Sprague to surging inquiries as to how his food set, and whether he didn't think his popper was too strict with him. A more embarrassing problem was raised by the surprise, in the shape of peanut candy or chocolate creams, which he was invited to hunt for in grandma's pockets, and which Ralph had to confiscate on the way home, lest the dietary rules of Washington Square should be too visibly infringed. Sometimes Ralph found Mrs. Heaney, Ruddy and Jovial, seated in the armchair opposite Mrs. Sprague, and regaling her with selections from a new batch of clippings. During Andine's illness of the previous winter, Mrs. Heaney had become a familiar figure to Paul, who had learned to expect almost as much from her bag as from his grandmother's pockets, so that the intempered Saturdays at the Malibran were usually followed by languid and epistemic Sundays in Washington Square. Mrs. Heaney, being unaware of this sequel to her bounties, formed the habit of repairing regularly on Saturdays, and while she chatted with his grandmother, the little boy was encouraged to scatter the grimy carpet with face creams and bunches of clippings in his thrilling quest for the sweets at the bottom of her bag. I declare, if he ain't in just as much of a hurry for everything as his mother, Shakespeare exclaimed one day, in her rich, rolling voice, and stooping to pick up a long strip of newspaper which Paul had flung aside, she added, as she smoothed it out. I guess if he was a little might older he'd be better pleased with this and with the candy. It's the very thing I was trying to find for you the other day, Mrs. Sprague. She went on, holding the bit of paper at arm's length, and she began to read out, with a loudness proportioned to the distance between her eyes and the text. With two such sprinters as Pete Van Deegan and Dicky Bowles to set the pace, it's no wonder the New York set in Paris has struck a livelier gate than ever this spring. It's a high-pressure season and no mistake, and no one lags behind less than the fascinating Mrs. Ralph Marvel, who is to be seen daily and nightly in all the smartest restaurants and naughtiest theaters, with so many devoted swains in attendance that the rival beauties of both worlds are set to be making catty comments. But then Mrs. Marvel's gowns are almost as good as her looks, and how can you expect the other women to stand for such a monopoly? To escape the strain of these visits Ralph once or twice tried the experiment of leaving Paul with his grandparents and calling for him in the late afternoon. But one day on re-entering the Malabran he was met by a small abashed figure clad in a kaleidoscopic tartan and a green velvet cap with a silver thistle. After this experience of the surprises of which Grandma was capable when she had a chance to take Paul shopping, Ralph did not again venture to leave his son, and their subsequent Saturdays were passed together in the sultry gloom of the Malabran. Conversation with the Sprags was almost impossible. Ralph could talk with his father-in-law in his office, but in the hotel parlor Mr. Sprags sat in a ruminating silence broken only by the omission of an occasional, well, well, address to his grandson. As for Mrs. Sprag, her son-in-law could not remember having had a sustained conversation with her since the distant day when he had first called at the Centaurian and had been entertained in Undine's absence by her astonished mother. The shock of that encounter had moved Mrs. Sprag to eloquence, but Ralph's entrance into the family, without making him seem less of a stranger, appeared once for all to have relieved her of the obligation of finding something to say to him. The one question she invariably asked, he heard from Undy, had been relatively easy to answer while his wife's infrequent letters continued to arrive, but a Saturday came when he felt the blood rise to his temples as, for the fourth consecutive week, he stammered out under the snapping eyes of Mrs. Heaney. No, not by this post either. I begin to think I must have lost a letter. And it was then that Mr. Sprag would sit silently looking up at the ceiling, cut short his wife's exclamation by an inquiry about real estate in the Bronx. After that, Ralph noticed, Mrs. Sprag never again renewed her question, and he understood that his father-in-law had guessed his embarrassment and wished to spare it. Ralph had never thought of looking for any delicacy of feeling under Mr. Sprag's large, lazy irony, and the incident drew the two men nearer together. Mrs. Sprag, for her part, was certainly not delicate, but she was simple and without malice, and Ralph liked her for a silent acceptance of her diminished state. Sometimes, as he sat between the lonely, primitive old couple, he wondered from what source Undy's voracious ambitions had been drawn. All she cared for, and attached importance to, was as remote from her parents' conception of life as her impatient greed from their passive stoicism. One hot afternoon, toward the end of June, Ralph suddenly wondered if Claire Van Degen were still in town. She had died in Washington Square some ten days earlier, and he remembered her saying that she'd sent the children down to Long Island, but that she herself meant to stay on in town till the heat grew unbearable. She hated her big showy place on Long Island. She was tired of the spring trip to London and Paris, where one met at every turn the faces one had grown sick of seeing all winter, and she declared that in the early summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers. She put the case amusingly, and it was like her to take up any attitude that went against the habits of her set, but she lived at the mercy of her moods, and one could never tell how long any one of them would rule her. As he sat in his office, with the noise and glare of the antlers afternoon rising up in hot waves from the street, they wandered into Ralph's mind a vision of her shady drawing room. All day it hung before him like the mirage of a spring before a dusty traveller. He felt a positive thirst for her presence, for the sound of her voice, the wide spaces and luxurious silences surrounding her. It was perhaps because on that particular day a spiral pain was twisting around to the back of his head and digging in a little deeper with each twist, and because the figures on the balance sheet before him were hopping about like black imps in an infernal form of them back, that the picture hung there so persistently. It was a long time since he had wanted anything as much as, at that particular moment, he wanted to be with Claire and hear her voice, and as soon as he had ground out the day's measure of work he rang up the Van Degen palace and learned that she was still in town. The lowered awnings of her inner drawing room cast a luminous shadow on old cabinets and consoles, and on the pale flowers scattered here and there in vases of bronze and porcelain. Claire's taste was as capricious as her moods, and the rest of the house was not in harmony with this room. There was, in particular, another drawing room, which she now described as Peter's creation, but which Ralph knew to be partly hers, a heavily decorated apartment, where Popples portrait of her thrown over a waste of gilt furniture. It was characteristic that today she had had Ralph shown in by another way, and that as she had spared him the polyphonic drawing room, so she had skillfully adapted her own appearance to her soberer background. She sat near the window, reading, in a clear cool dress, and at his entrance she merely slipped the finger between the pages and looked up at him. Her way of receiving him made him feel at restlessness and stridency or as unlike her genuine self as the gilded drawing room, and that this quiet creature was the only real Claire, the Claire who'd once been so nearly his, and who seemed to want him to know that she had never wholly been anyone else's. Why didn't you let me know you were still in town? He asked, as he sat down in the sofa corner near her chair. Her dark smile deepened. I hoped you'd come and see. One never knows with you. He was looking about the room with a kind of confused pleasure in its pale shadows and spots of dark, rich color. The old lacquered screen behind Claire's head looked like a lusterless black pool with gold leaves floating on it, and another piece, a little table at her elbow, had the brown bloom and the pearl-like curves of an old violin. I like to be here, Ralph said. She didn't make the mistake of asking. Then why do you never come? Instead she turned away and drew an inner curtain across the window to shut out the sunlight which was beginning to slant in and the awning. The mere fact of her not answering and the final touch of well-being which her gesture gave reminded him of other summer days they had spent together, long, rambling, boy and girl days in the hot woods and fields, while they had never thought of talking to each other unless there was something they particularly wanted to say. His tired fancy strayed off for a second to the thought of what it would have been like to come back at the end of the day to such a sweet community of silence, but his mind was too crowded with importunate facts for any lasting view of visionary distances. The thought faded and he merely felt how restful it was to have her near. I'm glad you stayed in town. You must let me come again, he said. I suppose she can't always get away, she answered, and she began to listen with grave intelligent eyes to his description of his tedious days. With her eyes on him he felt the exquisite relief of talking about himself as he had not dared to talk to anyone since his marriage. He would not for the world have confessed his discouragement, his consciousness of incapacity. To Andine and in Washington Square any hint of failure would have been taken as a criticism of what his wife demanded of him. Only to Claire Van Degen could he cry out his present despondency and his loathing of the interminable task ahead. A man doesn't know till he tries it how killing uncongenial work is and how it destroys the power of doing what one's fitful, even if there's time for both. But there's pull to be looked out for, and I dare not chuck my job. I'm in mortal terror of its chucking me. Little by little he slipped into a detailed recital of all his lesser worries, the most recent of which was his experience with the Lipscombs, who after a two-month tenancy of the West End Avenue house had decamped without paying their rent. Claire laughed contemptuously. Yes, I heard he'd come to grieve and been suspended from the stock exchange, and I see in the papers that this wife's retort has been to sue for a divorce. Ralph knew that, like all their clan, his cousin regarded a divorce suit as a vulgar and unnecessary way of taking the public into one's confidence. His mind flashed back to the family feast in Washington Square in celebration of his engagement. He recalled his grandfather's chance allusion to Mrs. Lipscomb, and Undine's answer floated out on our highest note. Oh, I guess she'll get a divorce pretty soon. He's been a disappointment to her. Ralph could still hear the horrified murmur with which his mother had rebuked his laugh, for he had laughed, had thought Undine's speech fresh and natural. Now he felt the ironic rebound of her words. Heaven knew he had been a disappointment to her, and what was there in her own feeling or in her inherited prejudices to prevent her seeking the same redress as Mabel Lipscomb? He wondered if the same thought were in his cousin's mind. They began to talk of other things, books, pictures, plays, and one by one the closed doors opened, and light was led into the dusty, shuddered places. Claire's mind was neither keen nor deep. Ralph, in the past, had smiled at her rash arduous and vague intensities. But she had his own range of illusions and a great gift of momentary understanding, and he had so long beaten his thoughts out against a blank wall of incomprehension that her sympathy seemed full of insight. She began by a question about his writing, but the subject was distasteful to him, and he turned to talk to a new book in which he had been interested. She knew enough of it to slip in the right word here and there, and thence they wandered on to kindred topics. Under the warmth of her attention his torpid ideas awoke again, and his eyes took their filled pleasure as she leaned forward, her thin brown hands clasped on her knees, and her eager face reflecting all his feelings. There was a moment when the two currents of sensation were merged in one, and he began to feel confusedly that he was young, and she was kind, and there was nothing he would like better than to go on sitting there, not much caring what she said or how he answered, if only she would let him look at her, and give him one of her thin brown hands to hold. Then the corkscrew in the back of his head dug into him again with a deeper thrust, and she seemed suddenly to recede to a greater distance and be divided from him by a fog of pain. The fog lifted after a minute, but it left him clearly remote from her, from the cool room with its scents and shadows, and from all the objects which, a moment before, had so sharply impinged upon his senses. It was as though he looked at it all through a rain-blurred pain against which his hand would strike if he held it out to her. That impression passed also, and he found himself thinking how tired he was, and how little anything mattered. He recalled the unfinished piece of work on his desk, and for a moment had the odd illusion that it was there before him. She exclaimed, but are you going? And her exclamation made him aware that he'd left his seat and was standing in front of her. He fancied there was some kind of appeal in her brown eyes, but she was so dim and far off that he couldn't be sure of what she wanted, and the next moment he found himself shaking hands with her, and heard her saying something kind and cold about it having been so nice to see him. Halfway up the stairs, little Paul, shining and rosy from supper, lurked in ambush for his evening game. Ralph was fond of stooping down to let the boy climb up his outstretched arms to his shoulders, but today, as he did so, Paul's hug seemed to crush him in a vice, and the shout of welcome that accompanied it wrecked his ears like an explosion of steam whistles. The queer distance between himself and the rest of the world was annihilated again. Everything stared and glared and clutched him. He tried to turn away his face from the child's hot kisses, and as he did so, he caught sight of a mauve envelope among the hats and sticks on the whole table. Instantly he paused Paul over to his nurse, stemmed out a word about being tired, and sprang up the long flights to his study. The pain in his head had stopped, but his hands trembled as he tore open the envelope. Within it was a second letter, bearing a French stamp, and a dress to himself. It looked like a business communication and had apparently been sent to Andine's Hotel in Paris and forwarded to him by her hand. Another bill, he reflected grimly, as he threw it aside and felt in the outer envelope for her letter. There was nothing there, and after a first sharp pang of disappointment he picked up the enclosure and opened it. Inside was a litographed circular, headed confidential, and bearing the Paris address of a firm of private detectives who undertook in conditions of attested and inviolable discretion to investigate delicate situations, look up doubtful antecedents, and furnish reliable evidence of misconduct, all in the most reasonable terms. For a long time Ralph sat and stared at this document. Then he began to laugh, and tossed it into the scrap basket. After that, with a groan, he dropped his head against the edge of his writing-table. End of Chapter 21 When he woke, the first thing he remembered was the fact of having cried. He could not think how he had come to be such a fool. He hoped to heaven no one had seen him. He supposed he must have been worrying about the unfinished piece of work at the office. Where was it, by the way, he wondered? Why, where he had left at the day before, of course! What a ridiculous thing to worry about! But it seemed to follow him about like a dog. He said to himself that he must get up presently and go down to the office—presently, when he could open his eyes. Just now there was a dead weight on them. He tried one after another in vain. The effort set him weakly trembling, and he wanted to cry again. Nonsense! He must get out of bed. He stretched his arms out, trying to reach something to pull himself up by, but everything slipped away and evaded him. It was like trying to catch at bright short waves. Then suddenly his fingers clasped themselves about something firm and warm. A hand—a hand that gave back his pressure. The relief was inexpressible. He lay still and let the hand hold him, while mentally he went through the motions of getting up and beginning to dress. So indistinct were the boundaries between thought and action, that he really felt himself moving about the room in a queer, disembodied way, as one treads the air and sleep. Then he felt the bed-clothes over him and the pillows under his head. I must get up, he said, and pulled at the hand. It pressed him down again, down into a dim, deep pool of sleep. He lay there for a long time, in a silent blackness far below light and sound. Then he gradually floated to the surface with the buoyancy of a dead body. But his body had never been more alive. Jagged strokes of pain tore through it, hands dragged at it with nails that bit like teeth. They wound thongs about him, bound him, tied weights to him, tried to pull him down with them. But still he floated. Floated, danced on the fiery waves of pain, with barbed light pouring down on him from an airy sky. Charmed intervals of rest, blue sailings on melodious seas, alternated with the anguish. He became a leaf on the air, a feather on a current, a straw on the tide, the spray of the waves spinning itself to sunshine as the wave toppled over into gulfs of blue. He woke on a stony beach, his legs and arms still lashed to his sides, and the thongs cutting into him. But the fierce sky was hidden, and hidden by his own languid lids. He felt the ecstasy of decreasing pain, and courage came to him to open his eyes and look about him. The beach was his own bed. The tempered light lay on familiar things, and someone was moving about in a shadowy way between bed and window. He was thirsty, and someone gave him a drink. His pillow burned, and someone turned the cool side out. His brain was clear enough now for him to understand that he was ill, and to want to talk about it. But his tongue hung in his throat like a clapper and a bell. He must wait till the rope was pulled. So time and life stole back on him, and his thoughts laboured weakly with dim fears. Slowly he cleared away through them, adjusted himself to his strange state, and found out that he was in his own room in his grandfather's house, that alternating with the white-capped faces about him were those of his mother and sister, and that in a few days, if he took his beef tea and didn't fret, Paul would be brought up from Long Island, wither on account of the great heat he had been carried off by Claire Van Degen. No one named Undine to him, and he did not speak of her. But one day as he lay in bed in the summer twilight, he had a vision of a moment, a long way behind him, at the beginning of his illness it must have been, when he had called out for her in his anguish, and someone had said, She's coming, she'll be here next week. Could it be that next week was not yet here? He supposed that illness robbed one of all sense of time, and he lay still as if in ambush, watching his scattered memories come out one by one and join themselves together. If he watched long enough, he was sure he should recognize one that fit into his picture of the day when he had asked for Undine. And at length the face came out of the twilight, a freckled face, benevolently bent over him under a starched cap. He had not seen the face for a long time, but suddenly it took shape and fitted itself into the picture. Laura Fairford sat nearby, a book on her knee, at the sound of his voice she looked up. What was the name of the first nurse? The first? The one that went away. Oh! Miss Hicks, you mean! How long is it since she went? It must be three weeks. She had another case. He thought this over carefully, then he spoke again. Call on Dean. She made no answer, and he repeated irritably, Why don't you call her? I want to speak to her. Mrs. Fairford laid down her book and came to him. She's not here just now. He dealt with this also, laboriously. You mean she's out. She's not in the house. I mean she hasn't come yet. As she spoke, Ralph felt a sudden strength and hardness in his brain and body. Everything in him became as clear as noon. But it was before Miss Hicks left that you told me you'd sent for her, and that she'd be here the following week, and you say Miss Hicks has been gone three weeks. This was what he had worked out in his head, and what he meant to say to his sister, but something seemed to snap shut in his throat, and he closed his eyes without speaking. Even when Mr. Sprague came to see him, he said nothing. They talked about his illness, about the hot weather, about the rumours that Parmin B. Driscoll was again threatened with indictment, and then Mr. Sprague pulled himself out of his chair and said, I presume you'll call round at the office before you leave the city. Oh yes, as soon as I'm up, Ralph answered. They understood each other. Claire had urged him to come down to Long Island, complete his convalescence there, but he preferred to stay in Washington Square till he should be strong enough for the journey to the Adirondacks, whether Laura had already preceded him with Paul. He did not want to see anyone but his mother and grandfather till his legs could carry him to Mr. Sprague's office. It was an oppressive day in mid-August with the yellow mist of heat in the sky when he at last entered the big office building. Swirls of dust lay on the mosaic floor, and a stale smell of decayed fruit and salt air and steaming asphalt filled the place like a fog. As he shot up in the elevator, someone slapped him on the back, and turning he saw Elmer Moffat at his side, smooth and Rubicon under a new straw hat. Moffat was loudly glad to see him. I haven't laid eyes on you for months, at the old stand still. So am I, he added, as Ralph assented. Hope to see you there again some day. Don't forget it's my turn this time. Glad if I can be any use to you. So long. Ralph's weak bones ached under his handshake. How's Mrs. Marbell? He turned back from his landing to call out. And Ralph answered, Thanks. She's very well. Mr. Sprague sat alone in his murky in her office. The fly blown engraving of Daniel Webster above his head and the congested scrap basket beneath his feet. He looked fagged and sallow. Like the day. Ralph sat down on the other side of the desk. For a moment his throat contracted as it had when he had tried to question his sister. Then he asked, Where's Undine? Mr. Sprague glanced at the calendar that hung from a hat peg on the door. Then he released the masonic emblem from his grasp, drew out his watch, and consulted it critically. If the train's on time, I presume she's somewhere between Chicago and Omaha round about now. Ralph stared at him wondering if the heat had gone to his head. I don't understand. The twentieth centuries generally considered the best route to Dakota. Explain, Mr. Sprague, who pronounced the word Rout. Do you mean to say Undine's in the United States? Mr. Sprague's lower lip groped for the phantom toothpick. Well, let me see. Hasn't Dakota been a state for a year or two now? Oh, God! Ralph cried, pushing his chair back violently and striding across the narrow womb. As he turned, Mr. Sprague stood up and advanced a few steps. He had given up the quest for the toothpick, and his drawn-in lips were no more than a narrow depression in his beard. He stood before Ralph, absolutely shaking the loose change in his trouser pockets. Ralph felt the same hardness and lucidity that had come to him when he had heard his sister's answer. She's gone, you mean—left me, with another man. Mr. Sprague drew himself up with a kind of slouching majesty. My daughter is not that style. I understand Undine thinks that there have been mistakes on both sides. She considers the tie was formed too hastily. I believe desertion is the usual plea in such cases. Ralph stared about him, hardly listening. He did not resent his father-in-law's tone. In a dim way he guessed that Mr. Sprague was suffering hardly less than himself, but nothing was clear to him save the monstrous fact suddenly upheaved in his path. His wife had left him, and the plan for her evasion had been made and executed while he lay helpless. She had seized the opportunity of his illness to keep him in ignorance of her design. The humour of it suddenly struck him, and he laughed. Do you mean to tell me that Undine's divorcing me? I presume that's her plan, Mr. Sprague admitted. For desertion! Ralph pursued, still laughing. His father-in-law hesitated a moment, then he answered, You've always done all you could for my daughter. There wasn't any other plea she could think of. She presumed this would be the most agreeable to your family. It was good of her to think of that. Mr. Sprague's only comment was a sigh. Does she imagine I won't fight it? Ralph broke out with sudden passion. His father-in-law looked at him thoughtfully. I presume you realise it ain't easy to change Undine once she's set on a thing? Perhaps not, but if she really means to apply for a divorce I can make it a little less easy for her to get. That's so, Mr. Sprague conceded. He turned back to his revolving chair, and seating himself in it began to drum on the desk with cigar-stained fingers. And by God I will! Ralph thundered. Anger was the only emotion in him now. He had been fooled, cheated, made amok of, but the score was not settled yet. He turned back and stood before Mr. Sprague. I suppose she's gone with Van Degen? My daughter's gone alone, sir. I saw her off at the station. I understood she was to join a lady-friend. At every point Ralph felt his hold slip off the surface of his father-in-law's impervious fatalism. Does she suppose Van Degen's going to marry her? Undine didn't mention her future plans to me. After a moment Mr. Sprague appended. If she had I should have declined to discuss them with her. Ralph looked at him curiously, perceiving that he intended in this negative way to imply his disapproval of his daughter's course. I shall fight it! I shall fight it! the young man cried again. You may tell her I shall fight it to the end. Mr. Sprague pressed the nib of his pen against the dust-coated ink-stand. I suppose you would have to engage a lawyer. She'll know it that way, Hiramart. She'll know it. You may count on that. Ralph had begun to laugh again. Suddenly he heard his own laugh and it pulled him up. What was he laughing about? What was he talking about? The thing was to act, to hold his tongue, and act. There was no use uttering windy threats to this broken-spirited old man. A fury of action burned in Ralph, pouring light into his mind and strengthened to his muscles. He caught up his hat and turned to the door. As he opened it, Mr. Sprague rose again and came forward with his slow, shambling step. He laid his hand on Ralph's arm. I had it given anything—anything short of my girl herself, not to have this happen to you, Ralph Marvell. Thank you, sir," said Ralph. They looked at each other for a moment. Then Mr. Sprague added, "'But it has happened, you know. Bear that in mind. Nothing you can do will change it. Time it again. I've found that a good thing to remember.'" End of CHAPTER XXII CHAPTER XXIII In the Adirondacks Ralph Marvell sat day after day on the balcony of his little house above the lake, staring at the great white cloud reflections in the water and at the dark line of trees that closed them in. Now and then he got into the canoe and paddled himself through a winding chain of ponds to some lonely clearing in the forest, and there he lay on his back in the pine needles and watched the great clouds form and dissolve themselves above his head. All his past life seemed to be symbolized by the building up and breaking down of those fluctuating shapes, which incalculable wind currents perpetually shifted and remodeled or swept from the zenith like a pinch of dust. His sister told him that he looked well—better than he had in years—and there were moments when his listlessness, his stony insensibility to the small pricks and frictions of daily life, might have passed for the serenity of recovered health. There was no one with whom he could speak of Andine. His family had thrown over the whole subject a pall of silence which even Laura Fairford shrank from raising. As for his mother, Ralph had seen at once that the idea of talking over the situation was positively frightening to her. There was no provision for such emergencies in the moral order of Washington Square. The affair was a scandal, and it was not in the stagnant tradition to acknowledge the existence of scandals. Ralph recalled a dim memory of his childhood, the tale of a misguided friend of his mother's who had left her husband for a more congenial companion, and who, years later, returning ill and friendless to New York, had appealed for sympathy to Mrs. Marvell. The latter had not refused to give it, but she had put on her black cashmere and two veils when she went to see her unhappy friend, and had never mentioned these errands of mercy to her husband. Ralph suspected that the constraint shown by his mother and sister was partly due to their having but a dim and confused view of what had happened. In their vocabulary the word divorce was wrapped in such a dark veil of innuendo as no lady-like hand would care to lift. They had not reached the point of differentiating divorces, but classed them indistinctively as disgraceful incidents in which the woman was always to blame. But the man, though her innocent victim, was yet inevitably contaminated. The time involved in the proceedings was viewed as a penitential season during which it behooved the family of the persons concerned to behave as if they were dead, yet any open allusion to the reason for adopting such an attitude would have been regarded as the height of indelicacy. Mr. Dagonet's notion of the case was almost as remote from reality. All he asked was that his grandson should thrash somebody, and he could not be made to understand that the modern drama of divorce is sometimes cast without a lovelace. You might as well tell me there was nobody but Adam in the garden when Eve picked the apple. You say your wife was discontented. No woman ever knows she's discontented till some man tells her so. My God! I've seen smash-ups before now, but I never yet saw a marriage dissolved like a business partnership—divorce without a lover. Why, it's—it's as unnatural as getting drunk on lemonade!" After this first explosion Mr. Dagonet also became silent, and Ralph perceived that what annoyed him most was the fact of the scandals not being one in any gentlemanly sense of the word. It was like some nasty business mess, about which Mr. Dagonet couldn't pretend to have an opinion, since such things didn't happen to men of his kind. That such a thing should have happened to his only grandson was probably the bitterest experience of his pleasantly uneventful life, and it added a touch of irony to Ralph's unhappiness to know how little, in the whole affair, he was cutting the figure Mr. Dagonet expected him to cut. At first he had shaped under the taciturnity surrounding him, had passionately longed to cry out his humiliation, his rebellion, his despair. Then he began to feel the tonic effect of silence, and the next stage was reached when it became clear to him that there was nothing to say. There were thoughts and thoughts. They bubbled up perpetually from the black springs of his hidden misery. They stole on him in the darkness of night. They blotted out the light of day. But when it came to putting them into words and applying them to the external facts of the case, they seemed totally unrelated to it. One more white and sun-touched glory had gone from his sky. But there seemed no way of connecting that with such practical issues as his being called on to decide whether Paul was to be put in knickerbockers or trousers, and whether he should go back to Washington Square for the winter or hire a small house for himself and his son. The latter question was ultimately decided by his remaining under his grandfather's roof. November found him back in the office again, in fairly good health, with an outer skin of indifference slowly forming over his lacerated soul. There had been a hard minute to live through when he came back to his old brown room in Washington Square. The walls and tables were covered with photographs of Undine, effigies of all shapes and sizes, expressing every possible sentiment dear to the photographic tradition. Ralph had gathered them all up when he had moved from West End Avenue after Undine's departure for Europe, and they throned over his other possessions as her image had throned over his future, the night he had sat in that very room and dreamed of soaring up with her into the blue. It was impossible to go on living with her photographs about him, and one evening, going up to his room after dinner, he began to unhang them from the walls and to gather them up from book-shelves and mantel-piece and tables. Then he looked about for some place in which to hide them. There were drawers under his bookcases, but they were full of old discarded things, and even if he emptied the drawers, the photographs in their heavy frames were almost all too large to fit into them. He turned next to the top shelf of his cupboard. But here the nurse had stored Paul's old toys, his sand-pales, shovels, and croquet-box. Every corner was packed with the vein impedimenta of living, and the mere thought of clearing a space in the chaos was too great an effort. He began to replace the pictures one by one, and the last was still in his hand when he heard his sister's voice outside. He hurriedly put the portrait back in its usual place on his writing-table, and Mrs. Fairford, who had been dining in Washington Square, and had come up to bid him good-night, flung her arms about him in a quick embrace and went down to her carriage. The next afternoon when he came home from the office, he did not at first see any change in his room, but when he had lit his pipe and thrown himself into his arm-chair, he noticed that the photograph of his wife's picture by Popple no longer faced him from the mantelpiece. He turned to his writing-table, but her image had vanished from there, too. Then his eye, making the circuit of the walls, perceived that they also had been stripped. Not a single photograph of Undine was left. Yet so adroitly had the work of elimination been done, so ingeniously the remaining objects readjusted that the change attracted no attention. Ralf was angry, sore, ashamed. He felt as if Laura, whose hand he instantly detected, had taken a cruel pleasure in her work, and for an instant he hated her for it. Then a sense of relief stole over him. He was glad he could look about him without meeting Undine's eyes, and he understood that what had been done to his room he must do to his memory and his imagination. He must so readjust his mind that, whichever way he turned his thoughts, her face should no longer confront him. But that was a task that Laura could not perform for him. A task to be accomplished only by the hard, continuous tension of his will. With the setting in of the mood of silence all desire to fight his wife's suit died out. The idea of touching publicly on anything that had passed between himself and Undine had become unthinkable. Insensibly he had been subdued to the point of view about him, and the idea of calling on the law to repair his shattered happiness struck him as even more grotesque than it was degrading. Nevertheless some contradictory impulse of his divided spirit made him resent, on the part of his mother and sister, a too ready acceptance of his attitude. There were moments when their tacit assumption that his wife was banished and forgotten irritated him like the hushed tread of sympathizers about the bed of an invalid who will not admit that he suffers. His irritation was aggravated by the discovery that Mrs. Marvell and Laura had already begun to treat Paul as if he were an orphan. One day, coming unnoticed into the nursery, Ralph heard the boy ask when his mother was coming back, and Mrs. Fairford, who was with him, she's not coming back, dearest, and you're not to speak of her to father. Ralph, when the boy was out of hearing, rebuked his sister for her answer. I don't want you to talk of his mother as if she were dead. I don't want you to forbid Paul to speak of her." Laura, though usually so yielding, defended herself. What's the use of encouraging him to speak of her when he's never to see her? The sooner he forgets her the better. Ralph pondered. Later, if she asks to see him, I shan't refuse. Mrs. Fairford pressed her lips together to check the answer. She never will. Ralph heard it, nevertheless, and let it pass. Nothing gave him so profound a sense of estrangement from his former life as the conviction that his sister was probably right. He did not really believe that Andine would ever ask to see her boy, but if she did he was determined not to refuse her request. Time wore on, the Christmas holidays came and went, and the winter continued to grind out the weary measure of its days. Toward the end of January, Ralph received a registered letter addressed to him at his office, and bearing in the corner of the envelope the names of a firm of Sioux Falls attorneys. He instantly defined that it contained the legal notification of his wife's application for divorce, and as he wrote his name in the postman's book he smiled grimly at the thought that the stroke of his pen was doubtless signing her release. He opened the letter, found it to be what he had expected, and locked it away in his desk without mentioning the matter to any one. He supposed that with the putting away of this document he was thrusting the whole subject out of sight, but not more than a fortnight later, as he sat in the subway on his way downtown, his eye was caught by his own name on the first page of the heavily headlined paper which the unshaved occupant of the next seat held between grimy fists. The blood rushed to Ralph's forehead as he looked over the man's arm and read, Society leader gets decree, and beneath it the subordinate clause says husband too absorbed in business to make home happy. For weeks afterward, wherever he went, he felt that blush upon his forehead. For the first time in his life the coarse fingering of public curiosity had touched the secret places of his soul, and nothing that had gone before seemed as humiliating as this trivial comment on his tragedy. The paragraph continued on its way through the press, and whenever he took up a newspaper he seemed to come upon it, slightly modified, variously developed, but always reverting with a kind of unctuous irony to his financial preoccupations and his wife's consequent loneliness. The phrase was even taken up by the paragraph writer, called forth excited letters from similarly situated victims, was commented on in humorous editorials, and served as a text for pulpit denunciations of the growing craze for wealth. And finally, at his dentist's, Ralph came across it in a family weekly, as one of the heart problems propounded to subscribers, with a gramophone, a straight front corset, and a vanity box among the prizes offered for its solution. End of Chapter 23 Chapter 24 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 Eugene Smith. The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton, Chapter 24. If you'd only had the sense to come straight to me, Undine Sprague, there isn't a tip I couldn't have given you, not one. This speech, in which a faintly contemptuous compassion for her friend's case was blunt with a frankest pride in her own, probably represented the nearest approach to tact that Mrs. Jane J. Rolliver had yet acquired. Undine was impartial enough to note in it a distinct advance on the youthful methods of Indiana Frust that it required a good deal of self-control to take the words to herself with a smile. While they seemed to be laying a visible scarlet welt across the pale face she kept vanishingly turned to her friend, the fact that she must permit herself to be pitied by Indiana Frust gave her the uttermost measure of the depth to which her fortunes had fallen. This abasement was inflicted on her in the staring gold apartment of the Hotel Nouveau Lucs, in which the Rollivers had established themselves on their recent arrival in Paris. The vast drawing room adorned only by two high-shouldered gilt baskets of orchids drooping on their wires reminded Undine of the Louis Suite in which the opening scenes of her own history had been enacted, and the resemblance and the difference were emphasized by the fact that the image of her past self was not inaccurately repeated in the triumphant presence of Indiana Rolliver. There isn't a tip I couldn't have given you, not one, Mrs. Rolliver reproachfully repeated, and all Undine's superiorities and discriminations seemed to shrivel up in the crude blaze of the other solid achievement. There was little comfort at noting for one's private delectation that Indiana spoke of her husband as Mr. Rolliver, that she twang'd a piercing arm, that one of her shoulders was still higher than the other, and that her striking dress was totally unsuited to the hour, the place, and the occasion. She still did, and was, all that Undine had so sedulously learned not to be and to do. But to dwell on these obstacles to her success was but to be more deeply impressed by the fact that she had nevertheless succeeded. Not much more than a year had elapsed since Undine Marvell, sitting in the drawing room of another Parisian hotel, had heard the immense orchestral murmur of Paris rise through the open windows like the ascending movement of her own hopes. The immense murmur still sounded on, deafening and implacable as some elemental force. In the discord in her fate, no more disturbed it than the motorwheels rolling by under the windows were disturbed by the particles of dust that they ground to find her powder as they passed. I could have told you one thing right off, Mrs. Rolliver went on with her ringing energy, and that is to get your divorce first thing. A divorce is always a good thing to have. You never can tell when you may want it. You ought to have attended to that before you even began with Peter Van Degen. Undine listened, irresistibly impressed. Did you? She asked. But Mrs. Rolliver, at this, grew suddenly veiled and sibiline. She wound her big bejeweled hand through her pearls. There were ropes and ropes of them. And leaned back, modestly sinking her lids. I'm here anyhow, she rejoined, with Kierkuumspika in look and tone. Undine, obedient to the challenge, continued to gaze at the pearls. They were real. There was no doubt about that. And so was Indiana's marriage, if she kept out of certain estates. Don't you see, Mrs. Rolliver continued, that having to leave him when you did and rush off to Dakota for six months was... Was giving him too much time to think? And giving it at the wrong time, too? Oh, I see, but what could I do? I'm not an immoral woman. Of course not, dearest. You were merely thoughtless. That's what I meant by saying you ought to have had your divorce ready. A flicker of self-esteem caused Undine to protest. It wouldn't have made any difference. His wife would never have given him up. She's so crazy about him? No, she hates him so. And she hates me, too, because she's in love with my husband. Indiana bounced out of her lounging attitude and struck her hands together with a rattle of rings. In love with your husband? What's the matter then? Why on earth didn't the four of you fix it up together? You don't understand. It was an undoubted relief to be able at last to say that to Indiana. Claire Van Degen thinks the war's wrong or rather awfully vulgar. Vulgar? Indiana flamed. If that isn't just too much. A woman who's in love with another woman's husband? What does she think we find I'd like to know? Having a lover, I suppose, like the women in these nasty French plays? I've told Mr. Oliver I won't go to the theater with him again in Paris. It's too utterly low. And the swell society is just as bad. It's simply rotten. Thank goodness I was brought up in a place where there's some sense of decency left. She looked compassionately at Undine. It was New York that demoralized you, and I don't blame you for it. Out of Apex, you'd have acted different. You never, never would have given way to your feelings before you'd got your divorce. A slow blush rose to Undine's forehead. He seemed so unhappy, she murmured. Oh, I know, said Indiana, in a tone of cold competence. She gave Undine an impatient glance. What was the understanding between you when you left Europe last August to go out to Dakota? Peter was to go to Reno in the autumn so that it wouldn't look too much as if we were acting together. I was to come to Chicago to see him on his way out there. And he never came? No. And he stopped writing? Oh, he never writes. Indiana heaved a deep sigh of intelligence. There's one perfectly clear rule, never let out of your sight a man who doesn't write. I know. That's why I stayed with him those few weeks last summer. Indiana sat thinking her fine, shallow eyes fixed unblinkingly on her friend's embarrassed face. I suppose there isn't anybody else? Anybody? Well, now you've got your divorce. Anybody else that would come in handy for? This was harder to bear than anything that had gone before. Undine could not have borne it if she had not had a purpose. Mr. Van Degen owes it to me. She began with an air of wounded dignity. Yes, yes, I know, but that's just talk. If there is anybody else? I can't imagine what you think of me, Indiana. Indiana, without appearing to resent this challenge, again lost herself in meditation. Well, I'll tell him he's just got to see you. She finally emerged from it to say, Undine gave a quick upward look. This was what she had been waiting for since she had read a few days earlier in the columns of her morning journal that Mr. Peter Van Degen and Mr. and Mrs. James J. Rolliver had been fellow passengers on board the semantic. But she did not betray her expectations by as much as the trim of an eyelash. She knew her friend well enough to pour out to her the expected tribute of surprise. What? Do you mean to say you know him, Indiana? Mercy, yes. He's around here all the time. He crossed on the steamer with us and Mr. Rolliver's taken a fancy to him, Indiana explained, in the tone of the absorbed bride to whom her husband's preferences are the sole criterion. Undine turned in tears, effused gaze on her. Oh, Indiana, if I could only see him again, I know it would be all right. He's awfully, awfully fond of me, but his family have influenced him against me. Oh, I know what that is, Mrs. Rolliver interjected. But perhaps, Undine continued, it would be better if I could meet him first without his knowing beforehand, without your telling him. I love him too much to reproach him, she added nobly. Indiana pondered. It was clear that, though the nobility of the sentiment impressed her, she was disinclined to renounce the idea of taking a more active part in their friend's rehabilitation. But Undine went on, of course you found out by this time that he's just a big spoiled baby. Afterward, when I've seen him, if you'd talk to him, or if you'd only just let him be with you and see how perfectly happy you and Mr. Rolliver are. Indiana seized on this at once. You mean that what he wants is the influence of a home like ours? Yes, yes, I understand. I tell you what I'll do. I'll just ask him around to dine and let you know the day without telling him beforehand that you're coming. Oh, Indiana. Undine held her in a close embrace, and then drew away to say, I'm so glad I found you. You must go round with me everywhere. There are lots of people here I want you to know. Mrs. Rolliver's expression changed from vague sympathy to concentrated interest. I suppose it's awfully gay here. Do you go round a great deal with the American set? Undine hesitated for a fraction of a moment. There are a few of them who are rather jolly, but I particularly want you to meet my friend, the Marquis Roviano. He's from Rome. And a lovely Austrian woman, Baroness Adlshine. Her friend's face was brushed by a shade of distrust. I don't know as I care much about meeting foreigners, she said, indifferently. Undine smiled. It was agreeable at last to be able to give Indiana a point as valuable as any of hers on divorce. Oh, some of them are awfully attractive, and they'll make you meet the Americans. Indiana caught this on the bound. One began to see why she had got on in spite of everything. Of course I'd love to know your friend, she said, kissing Undine, who answered, giving back the kiss. You know there's nothing on earth I wouldn't do for you. Indiana drew back to look at her with a comic grimace under which a shade of anxiety was visible. Well, that's a pretty large order, but there's just one thing you can do, dearest. Pleased to let Mr. Rolliver alone. Mr. Rolliver, my dear, Undine's laugh showed that she took this for unmixed comedy. That's a nice way to remind me that your heaps and heaps better looking than I am. Indiana gave her an acute glance. Millard Bench didn't think so, not even at the very end. Oh, poor Millard. The women's smiles mingled easily over the common reminiscence, and once again on the threshold, Undine unfolded her friend. In the light of the autumn afternoon, she paused and looked at the door of the nouveau luxe and looked aimlessly forth at the brave spectacle in which she seemed no longer to have a stake. Many of her old friends had already returned to Paris. Harvey Shalems, Mae Beringer, Dickie Bowles, and other westward bound nomads lingering on for a glimpse of the autumn theaters and fashions before hurrying back to inaugurate the New York season. A year ago, Undine would have had no difficulty in introducing Indiana Rollover to this group, a group above which her own aspirations already beat an impatient wing. Now her place in it had become too precarious for her to force an entrance for her protectress. Her New York friends were at no pains to conceal from her that, in their opinion, her divorce had been a blunder. Their logic was that of Apex reversed. Since she had not been sure of Van Degen, why in the world, they asked, had she thrown away a position she was sure of? This is Harvey Shalem in particular, had not scrupled to put the question squarely. Shal was awfully taken. He would have introduced you everywhere. I thought you were wild to know smart French people. I thought Harvey and I weren't good enough for you any longer. And now you've done your best to spoil everything. Of course I feel for you tremendously. That's the reason why I'm talking so frankly. You must be horribly depressed. Come and die tonight. Or no, if you don't mind, I'd rather you choose another evening. I'd forgotten that I'd asked the gym to riskles, and it might be uncomfortable for you. In another world, she was still welcome, at first perhaps, even more so than before. A world, namely, to which she had proposed to present Indiana or Oliver. Roviano, Madame Adelshine, and a few of the freer spirits of her old Samarit's band, reappearing in Paris with the clothes of the watering place season, had quickly discovered her and shown keen interest in her liberation. He'd appeared in some mysterious way to make her more available for their purpose. And she found that in the character of the last American divorcee, she was even regarded as eligible to the small and intimate inner circle of their loosely knit association. At first she could not make out what had entitled her to this privilege. An increasing enlightenment produced a revolt of the apex puritanism, which, despite some odd accommodations and compliances, still carried its head so high in her. Undine had been perfectly sincere in telling Indiana or Oliver that she was not an immoral woman, the pleasures for which her sex took such risks had never attracted her. And she did not even crave the excitement of having it thought that they did. She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life, amusement and respectability. And despite her surface sophistication, her notion of amusement was hardly less innocent than when she had hung on the plumber's fence with Indiana Frusk. It gave her, therefore, no satisfaction to find herself included among Madame Adelshine's intimates. It embarrassed her to feel that she was expected to be queer and different, to respond to passwords and talk in innuendo, to associate with the equivocal and the subterranean of the ingenuous daylight joys which really satisfied her soul. But the business shrewdness, which was never quite dormant in her, suggested that this was not the moment for such scruples. She must make the best of what she could get and wait her chance of getting something better. Meanwhile, the most practical use to which she could put her shady friends was to flash their authentic nobility in the dazzled eyes of Mrs. Rolliver. With this object in view, she made haste in the fashionable tea room of the Rue de Rivoli to group about Indiana the most titled members of the band. And the felicity of the occasion would have been unbarred had she not suddenly caught sight of Raymond de Cheve sitting on the other side of the room. She had not seen Cheve since her return to Paris. It had seemed preferable for her meeting to chance. And the present chance might have served as well as another but for the fact that among his companions were two or three of the most eminent ladies of the proud quarter beyond the Seine. It was what Undine, in moments of discouragement, characterized as her luck that one of these should be the hated Miss Wincher of Potash Springs who had now become two that Cheve and his compatriots however scandalized at her European companions would be completely indifferent to Mrs. Rolliver's appearance. One gesture of Madame de Trezac's eyeglass would wave Indiana to her place and thus brand the whole party as wrong. All this passed through Undine's mind in the very moment of her noting the change of expression with which Cheve had signaled if their encounter could have occurred in happier conditions it might have had far reaching results. As it was the crowded state of the tea room and the distance between their tables sufficiently excused his restricting his greeting to an eager bow and Undine went home heavy-hearted from this first attempt to reconstruct her past. Her spirits were not lightened by the developments of the next few days. She kept herself well in the foreground of Indiana's life and cultivated toward the rarely visible Rolliver a manner in which impersonal admiration for the statesman was tempered with the politest indifference to the man. Indiana seemed to do justice to her efforts and to be reassured by the result but still there came no hint of a reward. For a time Undine restrained her lips. But one afternoon when she had inducted Indiana into the deepest mysteries of Parisian complexion making the importance of the service and the confidential mood it engendered seemed to warrant a discreet allusion to their bargain. Indiana leaned back among her cushions with an embarrassed laugh oh my dear I've been meaning to tell you it's off I'm afraid the dinner is I mean you see Mr. Van Degen has seen you round with me and the very minute I asked him to come and dine he guessed he guessed and he wouldn't well no he wouldn't I hate to tell you oh Undine threw off a vague laugh since you're intimate enough for him to tell you that he must have told you more told you something to justify his behavior he couldn't even Peter Van Degen couldn't just simply have said to you I won't see her this is Raleigh hesitated visibly troubled to the point of regretting her intervention he did say more Undine insisted he gave you a reason he said you'd know oh how base how base Undine was trembling with one of her little girl rages the storms of destructive fury for which Mr. and Mrs. Sprag had cowered when she was a charming bold and curled cherub but life had administered some of the discipline which her parents had spared her and she pulled herself together with a gasp of pain of course he's been turned against me his wife has the whole of New York behind her and I have no one but I know it would be all right if I could only see him her friend made no answer and Undine pursued with an irrepressible outbreak of her old vehemence Indiana Raleigh if you won't do it for me I'll go straight off to his hotel this very minute I'll wait there in the hall till he sees me Indiana lifted a protesting hand don't Undine, not that why not well I wouldn't that's all you wouldn't, why wouldn't you you must have a reason Undine faced her with leveled brows without a reason you can't have changed so utterly since our last talk you were positive enough then that I had a right to make him see me somewhat to her surprise Indiana made no effort to allude the challenge yes I did think so then but I know now that it wouldn't do you the least bit of good have they turned him so completely against me I don't care I know him, I can get him back that's the trouble Indiana shed on her a gaze of cold compassion it's not that anyone has turned him against you it's worse than that what can be you'll hate me if I tell you and you better make him tell me himself I can't, I tried to the trouble is that it was you you did I mean something he found out about you Undine to estrange a spring of anger had to clutch both arms of her chair about me oh fearfully false well I've never even looked at anybody it's nothing of that kind Indiana's mournful head shake seemed to do poor in Undine an unsuspected moral obtuseness it's the way you acted to your own husband I my to Ralph he reproaches me for that Peter van Degen does well for one particular thing he says that the very day you went off with him last year you got a cable from New York telling you to come back at once to Mr. Marvell who was desperately ill how on earth does he know the cry escaped Undine before she could repress it it's true then Indiana exclaimed oh Undine Undine sat speechless and motionless the anger frozen to terror on her lips Mrs. Rollover turned on her the reproachful gaze of the deceived benefactors I didn't believe it when he told me I've never thought of it before you'd even applied for your divorce Undine made no attempt to deny the charge or to defend herself for a moment she was lost in the pursuit of an unceasable clue the explanation of this monstrous last perversity of fate suddenly she rose to her feet with a sick face Marvell must have told him the beasts relieved her to be able to cry it out it was your husband's sister your name was when you didn't answer her cable she cabled Mr. Van Degen to find out where you were and tell you to come straight back Undine stared he never did no doesn't that show you the stories all trumped up Indiana shook her head he said nothing to you about it because he was with you when you received the first cable and you told him it was from your sister-in-law just worrying you as usual to go home and when he asked if there was anything else in it you said there wasn't another thing Undine intently following her caught up this with a spray then he knew it all along he admits that and it made no earthly difference to him at the time she turned almost pictoriously on her friend did he have to explain that I wonder yes Indiana's long anonymity grew almost solemn it came over him gradually he said one day when he wasn't feeling very well he thought to himself would she act like that to me if I was dying and after that he never felt the same to you Indiana lowered her in purple lids men have feelings too even when they're carried away by passion after a pause she added I don't know I can blame him Undine you see you were his ideal end of chapter 24 chapter 25 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 go to LibriVox.org reading by Mary Rodie The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton Chapter 25 Undine Marvel for the next few months tasted all the accumulated bitterness of failure after January the drifting hordes of her compatriots had scattered to the four quarters of the globe leaving Paris to resume under its low gray sky its compact or winter personality noting from her more and more deserted corner each least sign of the social revival Undine felt herself as stranded and baffled as after the ineffectual summers of her girlhood she was not without possible alternatives but the sense of what she had lost took the savor from all that was left she might have attached herself to some migratory group winged for Italy but the prospect of travel did not in itself appeal to her and she was doubtful of its social benefit she lacked the adventurous curiosity which seeks its occasion in the unknown and though she could work doggedly for a given object the obstacles to be overcome had to be as distinct as the prize her one desire was to get back an equivalent of the precise value she had lost using to be Ralph Marvel's wife her new visiting card bearing her Christian name in place of her husbands was like the coin of a debased currency testifying to her diminished trading capacity her restricted means her vacant days all the minor irritations of her life were as nothing compared to this sense of a lost advantage even in the narrowed field of a Parisian winter she might have made herself a place in some more or less extra social world but her experiments in this line gave her no pleasure proportion to the possible derogation she feared to be associated with the wrong people and scented a shade of disrespect in every amicable advance the more pressing attentions of one or two men she had formally known filled her with a glow of outraged pride and for the first time in her life she felt that even solitude might be preferable to certain kinds of society since ill health was the most plausible pretext for seclusion it was almost a relief to find that she was really growing nervous and sleeping badly the doctor she summoned advised her trying a small quiet place on the shore not too near the sea and tither in the early days of December she transported herself with her maid and an omnibus load of luggage the place disconcerted her by being really small and quiet and for a few days she struggled against the desire for flight she had never before known a world as colorless and negative as that of a bright hotel where everybody went to bed at nine and donkey rides over stony hills were the only alternative to slow drives along dusty roads many of the dwellers in this temple of repose found even these exercises too stimulating and preferred to sit for hours under the palms in the garden playing patience embroidering or reading odd of taughnets andine driven by despair to an inspection of the hotel bookshelves discovered that scarcely any work they contained was complete but this did not seem to trouble the readers who continued to feed their leisure with mutilated fiction from which they occasionally raised their eyes to glance mistrustfully at the new arrival sweeping the garden gravel with her draperies the inmates of the hotel were of different nationalities but their racial differences were leveled by the stamp of a common mediocrity all differences of tongue of custom of physiognomy disappeared in this deep community of insignificance which was like some secret bond with the manifold signs and passwords of its ignorances exceptions it was not the heterogeneous mediocrity of the American summer hotel where the lack of any standard is the nearest approach to a tie but an organized codified dullness in conscious possession of its rights and strong in the voluntary ignorance of any others it took Undine a long time to accustom herself to such an atmosphere and meanwhile she fretted fumed and flaunted or abandoned herself to long periods of fruitless brooding sometimes a flame of anger shut up in her dismally illuminating the path she had traveled and the blank wall to which it led at other moments past and present were enveloped in a dull fog of rancor which distorted and faded even the image she presented in her morning mirror there were days when every young face she saw left in her a taste of poison but when she compared herself with the specimens of her sex who plied their languid industries under the palms or looked away as she passed them in the hall or staircase her spirits rose and she rang for her maid and dressed herself in her newest and vividest these were unprofitable triumphs however she never made one of her attacks on the organized disapproval of the community without feeling she had lost ground by it and the next day she would lie in bed and send down capricious orders for food which her maid would presently remove untouched with instructions to transmit her complaints to the landlord sometimes the events of the past year ceaselessly revolving through her brain became no longer a subject for criticism or justification but simply a series of pictures monotonously unrolled hour by hour in such moods she relived the incidents of her flight with Peter Van Degen the part of her career that since it had proved a failure seemed least like herself and most difficult to justify she had gone away with him and had lived with him for two months she, Undeen Marble to whom respectability was the breath of life to whom such follies had always been unintelligible and therefore inexcusable she had done this incredible thing and she had done it from a motive that seemed as clear as logical as free from the distorting mists of sentimentality as any of her father's financial enterprises it had been a bold move but it had been as carefully calculated as the happiest Wall Street stroke she had gone away with Peter because after the decisive scene in which she had put her power to the test to yield to him seemed to be the most notorious means of victory even to her practical intelligence it was clear that an immediate dash to Dakota might look too calculated and she had preserved herself respect by telling herself that she was really his wife and in no way to blame if the law delayed to ratify the bond she was still persuaded of the justness of her reasoning out of account her life with Van Degen had taught her many things the two had wandered from place to place spending a great deal of money always more and more money for the first time in her life she had been able to buy everything she wanted for a while this had kept her amused and busy but presently she began to perceive that her companions were as famous hers she saw that he had always meant it to be an unavout tie screened by Mrs. Shellam's companionship and Claire's careless tolerance and that on those terms he would have been ready to shed on their adventure the brightest blaze of notoriety but since Undine had insisted on being carried off like a sentimental school girl he meant to shroud the affair in concealing their relation as she was bent on proclaiming it in the powerful novels which Popple was fond of lending her she had met with increasing frequency the type of heroine who scorns to love clandestinely and proclaims the sanctity of passion and the moral duty of obeying its call Undine had been struck by these arguments as justifying and even ennobling force and had let Peter understand that she had been actuated by the highest motives in openly associating her life with his but he had opposed a placid insensibility to these illusions and had persisted in treating her as though their journey were the kind of escapade that a man of the world is bound to hide she had expected him to take her to all the showy places where couples like themselves are relieved from a too sustained contemplation of nature by the distractions of the restaurant and the gaming table but he had carried her from one obscure corner of Europe to another shunning fashionable hotels and crowded watering places and displaying an ingenuity in the discovery of the unvisited and the out of season that gave their journey an odd resemblance to her melancholy wedding tour she had never for a moment ceased to remember that the Dakota Divorce Court was the objective point of this later honeymoon and her illusions to the fact were as frequent as prudence permitted Peter seemed in no way disturbed by them he responded with expressions of increasing tenderness or the purchase of another piece of jewelry and though Undine could not remember his ever voluntarily bringing the subject of their marriage he did not shrink from her recurring mention of it he seemed merely too steeped in present well-being to think of the future and she ascribed this to the fact that his faculty of enjoyment could not project itself beyond the moment her business was to make the last came he should be conscious of a void to be bridged over as rapidly as possible and when she thought this point had been reached she packed her trunks and started for Dakota the next picture to follow was that of a dull months in the Western Divorce Town where to escape loneliness and devoid comment she had cast in her lot with Mabel Lipscomb who had lately arrived there and Undine at the outset had been sorry for the friend whose new venture seemed likely to result so much less brilliantly than her own but compassion had been replaced by irritation as Mabel's unpruned vulgarities her enormous encroaching satisfaction with herself and her surroundings began to pervade every corner of their provisional household Undine during the first months of her exile had been sustained by the fullest confidence in her future when she had parted from Mandigan she had felt sure he meant to marry her and the fact that Mrs. Lipscomb was fortified by no similar hope made her easier to bear with Undine was almost ashamed that the unrued Mabel should be the witness of her own felicity and planned to send her off to Denver when Peter should announce his arrival but the weeks passed and Peter did not come Mabel on the whole behaved well in this contingency Undine in her first exultation had confided all her hopes and plans to her friend but Mabel took no undue advantage of the confidence she was even tactful in her loud, fond, clumsy way with a tact that insistently loomed and buzzed about its victim's head but one day she mentioned that she had asked to dinner a gentleman from Little Rock who had come to Dakota with the same object as themselves and whose acquaintance she had made through her lawyer the gentleman from Little Rock came to Dine and within a week Undine understood that Mabel's future was assured if Mandigan had been at hand Undine would have smiled with him at poor Mabel's infatuation and her suitor's crudeness but Mandigan was not there he made no sign he sent no excuse he simply continued to absent himself and it was Undine who in due course had to make way for Mrs. Lipscomb's caller and sit upstairs with a novel while the drawing-room below was given up to the enacting of an actual love story even then even to the end Undine had to admit that Mabel had behaved beautifully but it was comparatively easy to behave beautifully when one is getting what one wants and when someone else who has not always been altogether kind is not the net result of Mrs. Lipscomb's magnanimity was that when on the day of parting she drew Undine to her bosom and on which her new engagement ring blazed Undine hated her as she hated everything else connected with her vain exile in the wilderness End of Chapter 25