← catalogue

The Custom of the Country

by Edith Wharton · English · Gutenberg #11052 · 807,450 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Custom of the Country
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Custom of the Country

Author: Edith Wharton


        
Release date: February 1, 2004 [eBook #11052]
                Most recently updated: December 23, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11052

Credits: Produced by Steve Harris and PG Distributed Proofreaders


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY ***




Produced by Steve Harris and PG Distributed Proofreaders




THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY

by EDITH WHARTON



1913




THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY




I

"Undine Spragg--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 defence was as feeble as her protest, and she continued to
smile on her visitor while Miss Spragg, 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. Heeny?" Mrs. Spragg murmured with deprecating pride.

Mrs. Heeny, a stout professional-looking person in a waterproof, her
rusty veil thrown back, and a shabby alligator bag at her feet, followed
the mother's glance with good-humoured approval.

"I never met with a lovelier form," she agreed, answering the spirit
rather than the letter of her hostess's enquiry.

Mrs. Spragg and her visitor were enthroned in two heavy gilt armchairs
in one of the private drawing-rooms of the Hotel Stentorian. The Spragg
rooms were known as one of the Looey suites, and the drawing-room walls,
above their wainscoting of highly-varnished mahogany, were hung with
salmon-pink damask and adorned with oval portraits of Marie Antoinette
and the Princess de Lamballe. In the centre of the florid carpet a gilt
table with a top of Mexican onyx sustained a palm in 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. Spragg 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-cheeked face, with
puffy eye-lids and drooping mouth, suggested a partially-melted wax
figure which had run to double-chin.

Mrs. Heeny, 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. Heeny was a
"society" manicure and masseuse. Toward Mrs. Spragg 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. Heeny'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. Spragg 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 from Mr. Marvell's sister--at least she says
she's his sister."

Mrs. Spragg, with a puzzled frown, groped for her eye-glass among the
jet fringes of her tightly-girded front.

Mrs. Heeny's small blue eyes shot out sparks of curiosity.
"Marvell--what Marvell is that?"

The girl explained languidly: "A little fellow--I think Mr. Popple said
his name was Ralph"; while her mother continued: "Undine 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?" Undine flashed back, her grey
eyes darting warnings at her mother under their straight black brows.

"Why, you SAID you thought--" Mrs. Spragg began reproachfully; but Mrs.
Heeny, heedless of their bickerings, was pursuing her own train of
thought.

"What Popple? Claud 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. Heeny?" Mrs. Spragg enquired.

"I should say I did. I manicured him for his first society portrait--a
full-length of Mrs. Harmon B. Driscoll." Mrs. Heeny smiled indulgently
on her hearers. "I know everybody. If they don't know ME they ain't in
it, and Claud Walsingham Popple's in it. But he ain't nearly AS in it,"
she continued judicially, "as Ralph Marvell--the little fellow, as you
call him."

Undine Spragg, 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 Marvells? Are THEY stylish?" she asked.

Mrs. Heeny gave the discouraged gesture of a pedagogue who has vainly
striven to implant the rudiments of knowledge in a rebellious mind.

"Why, Undine Spragg, 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. Spragg 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?"

Undine's perceptions were more rapid, and she fixed her eyes searchingly
on Mrs. Heeny.

"Do you mean to say Mr. Marvell's as swell as Mr. Popple?"

"As swell? Why, Claud Walsingham 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?"

Undine's face lit up as if a shaft of sunset had struck it through the
triple-curtained windows of the Stentorian.

"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. Heeny laughed. "HE saw you, didn't he?"

"Who? Ralph Marvell? Why, of course he did--Mr. Popple brought him to
the party here last night."

"Well, there you are... When a young man in society wants to meet a girl
again, he gets his sister to ask her."

Undine stared at her incredulously. "How queer! But they haven't all
got sisters, have they? It must be fearfully poky for the ones that
haven't."

"They get their mothers--or their married friends," said Mrs. Heeny
omnisciently.

"Married gentlemen?" enquired Mrs. Spragg, slightly shocked, but
genuinely desirous of mastering her lesson.

"Mercy, no! Married ladies."

"But are there never any gentlemen present?" pursued Mrs. Spragg,
feeling that if this were the case Undine 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 she gave
last week in this morning's TOWN TALK: I guess it's right here among my
clippings." Mrs. Heeny, swooping down on her bag, drew 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 smart small and
exclusive and there was much gnashing of teeth among the left-outs
as Madame Olga Loukowska gave some of her new steppe dances after
dinner'--that's the French for new dance steps," Mrs. Heeny concluded,
thrusting the documents back into her bag.

"Do you know Mrs. Fairford too?" Undine asked eagerly; while Mrs.
Spragg, impressed, but anxious for facts, pursued: "Does she reside on
Fifth Avenue?"

"No, she has a little house in Thirty-eighth Street, down beyond Park
Avenue."

The ladies' faces drooped 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 Undine. "I mass'd 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. Heeny
added with discrimination.

Undine was brooding over the note. "It IS written to mother--Mrs. Abner
E. Spragg--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. Heeny bluntly. "Don't you know it's the thing
in the best society to pretend that girls can't do anything without
their mothers' permission? You just remember that. Undine. You mustn't
accept invitations from gentlemen without you say you've got to ask your
mother first."

"Mercy! But how'll mother know what to say?"

"Why, she'll say what you tell her to, of course. You'd better tell her
you want to dine with Mrs. Fairford," Mrs. Heeny added humorously, as
she gathered her waterproof together and stooped for her bag.

"Have I got to write the note, then?" Mrs. Spragg asked with rising
agitation.

Mrs. Heeny reflected. "Why, no. I guess Undine can write it as if it was
from you. Mrs. Fairford don't know your writing."

This was an evident relief to Mrs. Spragg, and as Undine swept to her
room with the note her mother sank back, murmuring plaintively: "Oh,
don't go yet, Mrs. Heeny. I haven't seen a human being all day, and I
can't seem to find anything to say to that French maid."

Mrs. Heeny looked at her hostess with friendly compassion. She was well
aware that she was the only bright spot on Mrs. Spragg's horizon. Since
the Spraggs, some two years previously, had moved from Apex City to New
York, they had made little progress in establishing relations with their
new environment; and when, about four months earlier, Mrs. Spragg's
doctor had called in Mrs. Heeny to minister professionally to his
patient, he had done more for her spirit than for her body. Mrs. Heeny
had had such "cases" before: she knew the rich helpless family, stranded
in lonely splendour in a sumptuous West Side 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. Spragg 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 Mealey House, had been kept busy by the incessant struggle with
domestic cares; whereas New York seemed to offer no field for any form
of lady-like activity. She therefore took her exercise vicariously, with
Mrs. Heeny's help; and Mrs. Heeny knew how to manipulate her imagination
as well as her muscles. It was Mrs. Heeny who peopled the solitude of
the long ghostly days with lively anecdotes of the Van Degens, the
Driscolls, the Chauncey Ellings and the other social potentates whose
least doings Mrs. Spragg and Undine had followed from afar in 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. Spragg 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. Heeny, who crossed those sacred thresholds so familiarly, might
some day gain admission for Undine.

"Well--I'll stay a little mite 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. Spragg consentingly slipped the rings from her small mottled hands.
It was soothing to feel herself in Mrs. Heeny's grasp, and though she
knew the attention would cost her three dollars she was secure in the
sense that Abner wouldn't mind. It had been clear to Mrs. Spragg, ever
since their rather precipitate 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. Spragg and her husband
never touched on, even in the gilded privacy of their bedroom at the
Stentorian; and so completely had silence closed in on the subject that
to Mrs. Spragg 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. Spragg
did not mind the long delay for herself--she had stores of lymphatic
patience. 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. Spragg'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. Heeny's roomy palm.

"Who's that? Undine?"

"Yes. She seemed so set on that Mr. Popple's 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. Heeny, driving her nail-polisher cheeringly.

Mrs. Spragg 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. Heeny drew back to study the effect of her work. "You wait, Mrs.
Spragg, you wait. If you go too fast you sometimes have to rip out the
whole seam."

"Oh, that's so--that's SO!" Mrs. Spragg 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 set's 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. Heeny."

"Oh, I guess Undine's all right. A girl like her can afford to wait.
And if young Marvell's really taken with her she'll have the run of the
place in no time."

This solacing thought enabled Mrs. Spragg to yield herself unreservedly
to Mrs. Heeny's ministrations, which were prolonged for a happy
confidential hour; and she had just bidden the masseuse good-bye, and
was restoring the rings to her fingers, when the door opened to admit
her husband.

Mr. Spragg came in silently, setting his high hat down on the
centre-table, and laying his overcoat across one of the gilt chairs. He
was tallish, grey-bearded and somewhat stooping, with the slack figure
of the sedentary man who would be stout if he were not dyspeptic; and
his cautious grey eyes with pouch-like underlids had straight black
brows like his daughter's. 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 gently: "Well, mother?"

Mrs. Spragg remained seated, but her eyes dwelt on him affectionately.
"Undine's been asked out to a dinner-party; and Mrs. Heeny 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 Undine's that Mr. Spragg had been induced to give up the house
they had bought in West End Avenue, and move with his family to the
Stentorian. Undine 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. Spragg was easily induced to take the
same view, but Mr. Spragg 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. Spragg was therefore eager to have
him know that Undine really owed her first invitation to a meeting under
the roof of the Stentorian.

"You see we were right to come here, Abner," she added, and he absently
rejoined: "I guess you two always manage 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 down town?" she asked, her eyes
reflecting his anxiety.

Mrs. Spragg's knowledge of what went on "down town" was of the most
elementary kind, but her husband's face was the barometer in which she
had long been accustomed to read the leave to go on unrestrictedly,
or the warning to pause and abstain till the coming storm should be
weathered.

He shook his head. "N--no. Nothing worse than what I can see to, if you
and Undine 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, going over her dresses with that French
maid. I don't know as she's got anything fit to wear to that dinner,"
Mrs. Spragg added in a tentative murmur.

Mr. Spragg 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 of its being
shut; then, standing close before his wife, he lowered his voice to say:
"I saw Elmer Moffatt down town to-day."

"Oh, Abner!" A wave of almost physical apprehension passed over Mrs.
Spragg. Her jewelled 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.
Spragg'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 Abner-ing? Elmer Moffatt's nothing to us--no
more'n if we 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. Spragg 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 new set 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!"



II

Undine's white and gold bedroom, with sea-green panels and old rose
carpet, looked along Seventy-second 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 the new pigeon-blood notepaper with white ink; and
rather against her mother's advice she had ordered a large supply, with
her monogram in 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 Undine 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. Then she remembered Mrs. Heeny'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 truckle to any woman who lived in a small house
down beyond Park Avenue...

Undine was fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative. She
wanted to surprise every one by her dash and originality, but she could
not help modelling 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 than Mrs. Fairford's
"dine")--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. Spragg? Undine could not tolerate the thought of her mother's
abasing herself to a denizen of regions beyond Park Avenue, and she
resolutely formed the signature: "Sincerely, Mrs. Abner E. Spragg." Then
uncertainty overcame her, and she re-wrote her note and copied Mrs.
Fairford's formula: "Yours sincerely, Leota B. Spragg." But this struck
her as an odd juxtaposition of formality and freedom, and she made a
third attempt: "Yours with love, Leota B. Spragg." 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. Leota B. Spragg." That might be conventional.
Undine 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 want to look over all my
dinner-dresses."

Considering the extent of Miss Spragg'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. Spragg had succumbed to the abstract
pleasure of buying two or three more, simply because they were too
exquisite and Undine 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 common-place, 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," Undine
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 Claud Walsingham Popple, and her quieter but 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. Undine bolted
her door, dragged the tall pier-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 at 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 untempered a glare would have
been destructive to all half-tones and subtleties of modelling; but
Undine's beauty was as vivid, and almost as crude, as the brightness
suffusing 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.

Undine, 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 outskirt of Apex, and hung on the fence with Indiana
Frusk, 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 Atalanta to all the boyhood of
the quarter. Already Undine's chief delight was to "dress up" in her
mother's Sunday skirt and "play lady" before the wardrobe mirror. The
taste had outlasted childhood, and she still practised 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 notion of vivacity. She therefore watched herself
approvingly, admiring the light on her hair, the flash of teeth between
her smiling lips, the pure shadows 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 fulness 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 some day deviate from the perpendicular.

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 Marvell, 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 colour of her hair, she had
thrilled to the depths of her being. Even now it seemed incredible that
he should not turn out to be more distinguished than young Marvell: he
seemed so much more in the key of the world she read about in the Sunday
papers--the dazzling auriferous world of the Van Degens, the Driscolls
and their peers.

She was roused by the sound in the hall of her mother's last words to
Mrs. Heeny. Undine waited till their adieux were over; then, opening her
door, she seized the astonished masseuse and dragged her into the room.
Mrs. Heeny 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 black brows. "Mrs. Heeny, you've got to tell me the truth--ARE
they as swell as you said?"

"Who? The Fairfords and Marvells? If they ain't swell enough for you.
Undine Spragg, you'd better go right over to the court of England!"

Undine straightened herself. "I want the best. Are they as swell as the
Driscolls and Van Degens?"

Mrs. Heeny 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 B.
Driscoll of Fifth Avenue laying in her pink velvet bed with Honiton lace
sheets on it, and crying her eyes out because she couldn't get asked
to one of Mrs. Paul Marvell's musicals. She'd never 'a dreamt of being
asked to a dinner there! Not all of her money couldn't 'a bought her
that--and she knows it!"

Undine stood for a moment with bright cheeks and parted lips; then she
flung her soft arms about the masseuse. "Oh Mrs. Heeny--you're lovely
to me!" she breathed, her lips on Mrs. Heeny'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 at some of her escapes. Even since they had come 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 when 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 coronet,
and had confided in her that he had been forced to resign from a crack
cavalry regiment for fighting a duel about a Countess; and as a result
of these confidences she had pledged herself to him, and bestowed 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 sharp rivalry for her
favour 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 discomfited
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 stock-broker;
and Undine's first steps in social enlightenment dated from the day when
she had met Mrs. Harry Lipscomb, and been again taken under her wing.

Harry Lipscomb had insisted on investigating the riding-master's record,
and had found that his real name was Aaronson, 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 pommaded. 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 Spraggs 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
Stager, of Phalanx, Georgia," or (if the lady were literary) simply "my
friend Ora Prance Chettle of Nebraska--you know what Mrs. Chettle stands
for."

Some of these reunions took place in the lofty hotels moored like a
sonorously named fleet of battle-ships along the upper reaches of the
West Side: the Olympian, the Incandescent, the Ormolu; 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
lineaments of its most distinguished scions had been made familiar by
passionate poring 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 Claud Walsingham Popple,
engaged on the portrait of a lady whom the Lipscombs described as "the
wife of a Steel Magnet," felt it his duty to attend one of his client's
teas, where it became Mabel's privilege to make his acquaintance and to
name to him her friend Miss Spragg.

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
Aaronson mistake; yet she now saw she had blundered again in
distinguishing Claud Walsingham Popple while she almost snubbed his more
retiring companion. It was all very puzzling, and her perplexity had
been farther increased by Mrs. Heeny's tale of the great Mrs. Harmon B.
Driscoll's despair.

Hitherto Undine had imagined that the Driscoll and Van Degen clans and
their allies held undisputed suzerainty over New York society. Mabel
Lipscomb thought so too, and was given to bragging of her acquaintance
with a Mrs. Spoff, who was merely a second cousin of Mrs. Harmon B.
Driscoll's. Yet here was she. Undine Spragg of Apex, about to be
introduced into an inner circle to which Driscolls and Van Degens 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 at 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 and
opened the door into the drawing-room.

Mr. Spragg 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--has mother told you? Mrs. Fairford has asked me to dine. She's
Mrs. Paul Marvell's daughter--Mrs. Marvell was a Dagonet--and they're
sweller than anybody; they WON'T KNOW the Driscolls and Van Degens!"

Mr. Spragg surveyed her with humorous fondness.

"That 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. Spragg, 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. Spragg, 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.
Spragg interrupted, raising his hands to imprison his daughter's slender
wrists.

"Oh, well--if you want me to look like a scarecrow, and not get asked
again, I've got a dress that'll do PERFECTLY," Undine threatened, in a
tone between banter and vexation.

Mr. Spragg held her away at arm's length, a smile drawing up the loose
wrinkles about 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 Fairford 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.



III

Though she would not for the world have owned it to her parents, Undine
was disappointed in the Fairford 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.
Pairford or her brother had to jump up to push them in place, and the
ashes scattered over the hearth untidily.

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-coloured entrees in ruffled papers.
Instead, there was only a low centre-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. They were only eight
in number, but one was no less a person than young Mrs. Peter Van
Degen--the one who had been a Dagonet--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 grey moustache 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 Marvell's, were both lacking in Claud Walsingham's
dash.

Undine sat between Mr. Bowen and young Marvell, 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 itself
negatively instead of aggressively. Small, well-knit, fair, he sat
stroking his slight blond 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. Heeny 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 voluble than Mrs. Fairford, and had
a larger vocabulary: the difference was that with Mrs. Fairford
conversation 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 to-night the latter prevailed. She meant to watch and
listen without letting herself go, and she sat 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 any one 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 and books escaped
her, she caught and stored up every personal reference, and the pink in
her cheeks deepened at a 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!" Undine heard Mrs. Fairford breathe to Mr.
Bowen; who replied, at the same pitch: "It's a Van Degen reason, isn't
it?"--to which Mrs. Fairford shrugged assentingly.

"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 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 stronghold of
fashion. Her attention was diverted by hearing Mrs. Van Degen, under
cover of the general laugh, say in a low tone to young Marvell: "I
thought you liked his things, or 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." Marvell's tone was always so light, so unemphasized, that she
could not be sure of its 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 plaintive eyes and a fidgety frequent
laugh. But she was more elaborately dressed and jewelled than the other
ladies, and her elegance and her restlessness made her seem less alien
to Undine. She had turned on Marvell 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, her observer was unable to decide; 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
allusions 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 the 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 "Oolaloo" fourteen 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
who was trying to give "repertory" plays with a good stock company. The
conversation was revived for a moment by her recalling that she had seen
Sarah Bernhard 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 at Undine's side; and
since it was unheard-of at Apex for a married man to force his 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 when the rising of the elderly lady gave the signal
for departure.

In the hall, where young Marvell had managed to precede her. Undine
found Mrs. Van Degen putting on her cloak. As she gathered it about her
she laid her hand on Marvell'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.

"Good-bye, Miss Spragg. 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 Marvell 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 any one 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 Marvell'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."



IV

"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
tranquillization, and it was a blow to detect signs of the opposite
result when, late the next morning, their daughter came dawdling into
the sodden splendour of the Stentorian breakfast-room.

The symptoms of Undine's nervousness were unmistakable to Mr. and Mrs.
Spragg. They could read the approaching storm in the darkening of her
eyes from limpid grey to slate-colour, 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. Spragg, having finished the last course of his heterogeneous meal,
was adjusting his gold eye-glasses 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. Spragg folded his paper and hooked his
glasses to his waistcoat with the air of a man who prefers to know the
worst and have it over.

"An opera box!" faltered Mrs. Spragg, 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 'Cavaleeria,'" she
condescended to explain.

"That so?" Mr. Spragg thrust his hands into his waistcoat pockets, and
began 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 s'pose
you're thinking of taking mother and me?"

This was so obviously comic that they all laughed--even Mrs. Spragg--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. Spragg murmured: "She never HAS,
Abner,"--but Mr. Spragg's brow remained unrelenting.

"Do you know what a box costs?"

"No; but I s'pose 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. Spragg--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 table-cloth.

"We might as well go straight back to Apex," she breathed at last
between her teeth.

Mrs. Spragg cast a frightened glance at her husband. These struggles
between two resolute wills always brought on her palpitations, and she
wished she had her phial of digitalis with her.

"A parterre box costs a hundred and twenty-five dollars a night," said
Mr. Spragg, transferring a toothpick to his waistcoat pocket.

"I only want it once."

He looked at her with a quizzical puckering of his crows'-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 wheedling 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. Spragg, and it was
beginning to frighten her husband.

"Fact is, Undie," he said, weakening, "I'm a little mite strapped just
this month."

Her eyes grew absent-minded, as they always did when he alluded to
business. THAT was man's province; and what did men go "down town" 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. Spragg. She always had palpitations when
Undine rode, and since the Aaronson episode her fears were not confined
to what the horse might do.

"Why don't you take your mother out shopping a little?" Mr. Spragg
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. Spragg tottered meekly after her, and Mr. Spragg
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. Spragg 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. Spragg's occasional resistances
were merely due to an imperfect understanding of what constituted the
necessities of life.

When she returned from her ride Mrs. Spragg received her as if she had
come back from the dead. It was absurd, of course; but Undine was inured
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. Spragg 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. Spragg had
always performed these ancillary services for Undine.

"You know, Undie, 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. Spragg's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze;
but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck
courage, till Undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks.

She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while Mrs. Spragg,
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. Spragg 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: "You didn't meet
anybody when you were out, did you, Undie?"

Undine'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. Spragg, turning away to hide a look of
inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room.

The day wore on. Undine 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 Marvell had
not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess 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 Undine 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 choicer 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 Undine 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 eye-glass adorned with diamonds
and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the
opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements
and 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 jewelled eye-glass and chain. So
violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the
eye-glass, 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 saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick
as ear-lobes? 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 hat
in hand, saying sociably:

"The crowd's simply awful, isn't it?"

At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass 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 Marvell's cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of
Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner 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 Column? 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...

There was 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 finding Ralph Marvell'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? Didn't you tell him
I 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. Spragg 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. Spragg let the fact speak for itself--it
was too much 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, Undie."

This plea 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. Spragg 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 moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and
lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Spragg timidly
slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself
behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out
down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It
was one of Mrs. Spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting
of New York.

Undine 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; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the
future would be. And yet, as she had 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 summer. Her summers,
as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and
most exasperating in her life. The 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 Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb,
had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated
floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House
had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of
lifting the Spraggs 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 splendours 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 odours, 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--oh bliss ineffable!--went "east."

Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealey 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.

There Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards 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 Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her
repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, 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 hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more
delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled by a
peep through another 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 sat apart reading novels or playing
solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel's 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 or rattled 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 farther 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 rest-cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have
preferred to hire a house, but the "hole," 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, happened to notice the Sunday young men? They
were queerer even than the "belles" 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 mamma good, and now they had 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 that the Winchers classed her with the "hotel crew"--with the
"belles" 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 Spraggs at Skog
Harbour, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled
it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare wind-beaten inn, all
shingles without and blueberry pie within, was "exclusive," parochial,
Bostonian; and the Spraggs 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. If there had been any 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 Spraggs left Skog Harbour that Undine vowed to
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 was on
what Mrs. Heeny called "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 his hat 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 exulted.

Mr. Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. "That 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 humour. "I guess I'm too sick to
risk that." He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture
familiar to Apex City. "Come along down to dinner, mother--I guess
Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night."



V

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 semicircle 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, Undine 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 centre.

It was almost 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 first act 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, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being
able to name them--fixed figure-heads 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 an opera-box and not
use it! What on earth could the people be doing--what rarer 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 programme,
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 Marvell! "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 centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and
Ralph Marvell, 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
glitter of jewels on Mrs. Van Degen's bare shoulders to the way young
Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache 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 a circle so packed with the initiated?

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
intently observed from the neighbouring box. She turned around with a
feint of speaking to Mrs. Lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of Peter
Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had
replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely-set brilliants,
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 in her some reciprocal sign
of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her
programme.

"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 brimming,
too 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 Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and
bending easily over what she felt must be 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 entr'acte 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) "onto" 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.

"Undie, do look--there's Mr. Marvell!" 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
Marvell 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. Marvell 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 Marvell, small,
unattainable, remote, and that of Mabel Lipscomb, near-by, 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 moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, Mabel
strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. At the
Stentorian she was the centre 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 Marvell'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 there dawned on Undine what was to be one
of the guiding principles of her career: "IT'S BETTER TO WATCH THAN TO
ASK QUESTIONS."

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 Marvell 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 entr'acte was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen
stumbled over Mr. Lipscomb's legs. The foremost was Claud Walsingham
Popple; and above his shoulder shone the batrachian 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 Undine,
relegating the painter to Mrs. Lipscomb's elbow.

"Queer go--I happened to see your friend there waving to old Popp 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 d'you think of 'em, by the way? You ought
to be painted yourself--no, I mean it, you know--you ought to get old
Popp to do you. He'd do your hair ripplingly. 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? I say, that's first rate!"

Undine 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.
Peter 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 Marvell 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 companion's 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 Popp, 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 afterward... 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 sense of
failure overcame her again. Here was the evening nearly over, and what
had it led to? Looking up from the stalls, she had 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 in her back: "Say, you girls, I guess
I'll cut this and come back for you when the show busts up." They heard
him shuffle out of the box, and Mabel settled back to undisturbed
enjoyment of the stage.

When the last entr'acte 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 Marvell 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 Marvell'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 wrap 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 rapt 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 finely-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.
Marvell'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 allusion--but the instinct of sex told her
that, 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 to-night that I just LONG to know--they look so
lovely and refined--but I don't suppose I ever shall. New York's not
very friendly to strange girls, is it? I suppose you've got so many of
your own already--and they're all so 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 Marvell, having put his cousin into her motor,
started to walk home to Washington Square. At the corner he was joined
by Mr. Popple. "Hallo, Ralph, old man--did you run across our auburn
beauty of the Stentorian? Who'd have thought old Harry Lipscomb'd have
put us onto 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--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 Lipscombs. 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 prefer Mrs. Van Degen's
type--personally, I MUST have breeding--but as a mere bit of flesh and
blood... hallo, ain't you coming into the club?"

Marvell 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
Spragg, so others at any rate would think of her: almost every one 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 Marvell, 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 Dagonet, 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 houses 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 homogeneous growth which flowers
into what other countries know 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 Dagonet
attitude, the Dagonet view of life, the very lines of the furniture in
the old Dagonet 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 their 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 by 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.



VI

Upstairs, in his brown firelit room, he threw himself into an armchair,
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
Dagonet estate had mouldered 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 Dagonet 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 sea-side, Ralph, between tides,
had once come on a cave--a secret inaccessible place with glaucous
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, it 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, some one 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 Clare
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 is
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 Clare 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 then 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" take 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
Undine Spragg 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. Marry--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.

Harriet Ray was neither vulgar nor ambitious. She regarded Washington
Square as the birthplace of Society, knew by heart all the cousinships
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, certain modifications allowed for, there would always be plenty of
Harriet Rays 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 Undine Spragg. And now--? He lit a cigar, and
began to recall his hour's conversation with Mrs. Spragg.

Ralph had never taken his mother's social faiths very seriously.
Surveying the march of civilization from a loftier angle, he had early
mingled with the Invaders, and curiously observed their rites 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. Spragg 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. Spragg, once reconciled--or at least resigned--to the mysterious
necessity of having to "entertain" a friend of Undine's, had yielded to
the first touch on the weak springs of her garrulity. She had not seen
Mrs. Heeny for two days, and this friendly young man with the gentle
manner was almost as easy to talk to as the masseuse. And then she could
tell him things that Mrs. Heeny already knew, and Mrs. Spragg liked
to repeat her stories. To do so gave her almost her sole sense of
permanence among the shifting scenes of life. So that, after she had
lengthily deplored the untoward accident of Undine's absence, and her
visitor, with a smile, and echoes of divers et ondoyant in his brain,
had repeated her daughter's name after her, saying: "It's a wonderful
find--how could you tell 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 market the week she was born--" and then to explain, as he remained
struck and silent: "It's from UNdoolay, 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 Goliath Glue he sat up all night over the Bible to
get the name... No, father didn't start IN as a druggist," she went on,
expanding with the signs of Marvell'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 sorter drifted into the
ministry. Of course it didn't pay him anything like as well, so finally
he opened a drug-store, and he did first-rate at that too, though his
heart was always in the pulpit. But after he made such a success with
his hair-waver he got speculating in land out at Apex, and somehow
everything went--though Mr. Spragg did all he COULD--." Mrs. Spragg,
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. Spragg had come to Apex as a poor boy, and their
early married life had been a protracted struggle, darkened by domestic
affliction. Two of their three children had died of typhoid in the
epidemic which devastated Apex before the new water-works were built;
and this calamity, by causing Mr. Spragg 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 and
build the new reservoir up there: and after that we began to be better
off, and it DID seem as if it had come out so to comfort us some about
the children."

Mr. Spragg, 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. Spragg's untutored narrative, and he
understood no more than she the occult connection between Mr. Spragg's
domestic misfortunes and his business triumph. Mr. Spragg had "helped
out" his ruined 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. Spragg'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
undeceived subject race. The Spraggs had been "plain people" and had not
yet learned to be ashamed of it. The fact drew them much closer to the
Dagonet ideals than any sham elegance in the past tense. Ralph felt
that his mother, who shuddered away from Mrs. Harmon B. Driscoll, would
understand and esteem Mrs. Spragg.

But how long would their virgin innocence last? Popple's vulgar hands
were on it already--Popple's and the unspeakable Van Degen's! Once they
and theirs had begun the process of initiating Undine, 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 Van
Degen's--that was what made Ralph's temples buzz, and swept away all his
plans for his own future like a beaver's dam in a spring flood. To
save her from Van Degen and Van Degenism: 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 Undine'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 Clare 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. Diverse et ondoyante--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. Spragg'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 nonce--to cut her
bonds, snatch her up, and whirl her back into the blue...



VII

Some two months later than the date of young Marvell's midnight vigil,
Mrs. Heeny, seated on a low chair at Undine's knee, gave the girl's left
hand an approving pat as she laid aside her lapful of polishers.

"There! I guess you can put your ring on again," she said with a laugh
of jovial significance; and Undine, echoing the laugh in a murmur of
complacency, slipped on the fourth finger of her recovered hand a band
of sapphires in an intricate setting.

Mrs. Heeny took up the hand again. "Them's old stones, Undine--they've
got a different look," she said, examining the ring while she rubbed her
cushioned palm over the girl's brilliant finger-tips. "And the setting's
quaint--I wouldn't wonder but what it was one of old Gran'ma Dagonet's."

Mrs. Spragg, hovering near in fond beatitude, looked up quickly.

"Why, don't you s'pose he BOUGHT it for her, Mrs. Heeny? It came in a
Tiff'ny box."

The manicure laughed again. "Of course he's had Tiff'ny rub it up.
Ain't you ever heard of ancestral jewels, Mrs. Spragg? In the Eu-ropean
aristocracy they never go out and BUY engagement-rings; and Undine's
marrying into our aristocracy."

Mrs. Spragg looked relieved. "Oh, I thought maybe they were trying to
scrimp on the ring--"

Mrs. Heeny, shrugging away this explanation, rose from her seat and
rolled back her shiny black sleeves.

"Look at here, Undine, if you really want me to do your hair it's time
we got to work."

The girl swung about in her seat so that she faced the mirror on the
dressing-table. Her shoulders shone through transparencies of lace
and muslin which slipped back as she lifted her arms to draw the
tortoise-shell pins from her hair.

"Of course you've got to do it--I want to look perfectly lovely!"

"Well--I dunno's my hand's in nowadays," said Mrs. Heeny in a tone that
belied the doubt she cast on her own ability.

"Oh, you're an ARTIST, Mrs. Heeny--and I just couldn't have had that
French maid 'round to-night," sighed Mrs. Spragg, sinking into a chair
near the dressing-table.

Undine, with a backward toss of her head, scattered her loose locks
about her. As they spread and sparkled under Mrs. Heeny's touch, Mrs.
Spragg leaned back, drinking in through half-closed lids her daughter's
loveliness. Some new quality seemed added to Undine's beauty: it had a
milder bloom, a kind of melting grace, which might have been lent to it
by the moisture in her mother's eyes.

"So you're to see the old gentleman for the first time at this dinner?"
Mrs. Heeny pursued, sweeping the live strands up into a loosely woven
crown.

"Yes. I'm frightened to death!" Undine, laughing confidently, took up a
hand-glass and scrutinized the small brown mole above the curve of her
upper lip.

"I guess she'll know how to talk to him," Mrs. Spragg averred with a
kind of quavering triumph.

"She'll know how to LOOK at him, anyhow," said Mrs. Heeny; and Undine
smiled at her own image.

"I hope he won't think I'm too awful!"

Mrs. Heeny laughed. "Did you read the description of yourself in the
Radiator this morning? I wish't I'd 'a had time to cut it out. I guess
I'll have to start a separate bag for YOUR clippings soon."

Undine stretched her arms luxuriously above her head and gazed through
lowered lids at the foreshortened reflection of her face.

"Mercy! Don't jerk about like that. Am I to put in this
rose?--There--you ARE lovely!" Mrs. Heeny sighed, as the pink petals
sank into the hair above the girl's forehead. Undine pushed her chair
back, and sat supporting her chin on her clasped hands while she studied
the result of Mrs. Heeny's manipulations.

"Yes--that's the way Mrs. Peter Van Degen's flower was put in the other
night; only hers was a camellia.--Do you think I'd look better with a
camellia?"

"I guess if Mrs. Van Degen looked like a rose she'd 'a worn a rose,"
Mrs. Heeny rejoined poetically. "Sit still a minute longer," she added.
"Your hair's so heavy I'd feel easier if I was to put in another pin."

Undine remained motionless, and the manicure, suddenly laying both hands
on the girl's shoulders, and bending over to peer at her reflection,
said playfully: "Ever been engaged before, Undine?"

A blush rose to the face in the mirror, spreading from chin to brow, and
running rosily over the white shoulders from which their covering had
slipped down.

"My! If he could see you now!" Mrs. Heeny jested.

Mrs. Spragg, rising noiselessly, glided across the room and became lost
in a minute examination of the dress laid out on the bed.

With a supple twist Undine slipped from Mrs. Heeny's hold.

"Engaged? Mercy, yes! Didn't you know? To the Prince of Wales. I broke
it off because I wouldn't live in the Tower."

Mrs. Spragg, lifting the dress cautiously over her arm, advanced with a
reassured smile.

"I s'pose Undie'll go to Europe now," she said to Mrs. Heeny.

"I guess Undie WILL!" the young lady herself declared. "We're going to
sail right afterward.--Here, mother, do be careful of my hair!" She
ducked gracefully to slip into the lacy fabric which her mother held
above her head. As she rose Venus-like above its folds there was a tap
on the door, immediately followed by its tentative opening.

"Mabel!" Undine muttered, her brows lowering like her father's; and
Mrs. Spragg, wheeling about to screen her daughter, addressed herself
protestingly to the half-open door.

"Who's there? Oh, that YOU, Mrs. Lipscomb? Well, I don't know as you
CAN--Undie isn't half dressed yet--"

"Just like her--always pushing in!" Undine murmured as she slipped her
arms into their transparent sleeves.

"Oh, that don't matter--I'll help dress her!" Mrs. Lipscomb's large
blond person surged across the threshold. "Seems to me I ought to lend a
hand to-night, considering I was the one that introduced them!"

Undine forced a smile, but Mrs. Spragg, her soft wrinkles deepening with
resentment, muttered to Mrs. Heeny, as she bent down to shake out the
girl's train: "I guess my daughter's only got to show herself--"

The first meeting with old Mr. Dagonet was less formidable than Undine
had expected. She had been once before to the house in Washington
Square, when, with her mother, she had returned Mrs. Marvell's
ceremonial visit; but on that occasion Ralph's grandfather had not
been present. All the rites connected with her engagement were new and
mysterious to Undine, and none more so than the unaccountable necessity
of "dragging"--as she phrased it--Mrs. Spragg into the affair. It was an
accepted article of the Apex creed that parental detachment should be
completest at the moment when the filial fate was decided; and to find
that New York reversed this rule was as puzzling to Undine as to her
mother. Mrs. Spragg was so unprepared for the part she was to play
that on the occasion of her visit to Mrs. Marvell her helplessness had
infected Undine, and their half-hour in the sober faded drawing-room
remained among the girl's most unsatisfactory memories.

She re-entered it alone with more assurance. Her confidence in her
beauty had hitherto carried her through every ordeal; and it was
fortified now by the feeling of power that came with the sense of being
loved. If they would only leave her mother out she was sure, in her
own phrase, of being able to "run the thing"; and Mrs. Spragg had
providentially been left out of the Dagonet dinner.

It was to consist, it appeared, only of the small family group Undine
had already met; and, seated at old Mr. Dagonet's right, in the high
dark dining-room with mahogany doors and dim portraits of "Signers"
and their females, she felt a conscious joy in her ascendancy. Old Mr.
Dagonet--small, frail and softly sardonic--appeared to fall at once
under her spell. If she felt, beneath his amenity, a kind of delicate
dangerousness, like that of some fine surgical instrument, she ignored
it as unimportant; for she had as yet no clear perception of forces that
did not directly affect her.

Mrs. Marvell, low-voiced, faded, yet impressive, was less responsive
to her arts, and Undine divined in her the head of the opposition to
Ralph's marriage. Mrs. Heeny had reported that Mrs. Marvell had other
views for her son; and this was confirmed by such echoes of the short
sharp struggle as reached the throbbing listeners at the Stentorian. But
the conflict over, the air had immediately cleared, showing the enemy in
the act of unconditional surrender. It surprised Undine that there had
been no reprisals, no return on the points conceded. That was not her
idea of warfare, and she could ascribe the completeness of the victory
only to the effect of her charms.

Mrs. Marvell's manner did not express entire subjugation; yet she seemed
anxious to dispel any doubts of her good faith, and if she left the
burden of the talk to her lively daughter it might have been because
she felt more capable of showing indulgence by her silence than in her
speech.

As for Mrs. Fairford, she had never seemed more brilliantly bent
on fusing the various elements under her hand. Undine had already
discovered that she adored her brother, and had guessed that this
would make her either a strong ally or a determined enemy. The latter
alternative, however, did not alarm the girl. She thought Mrs. Fairford
"bright," and wanted to be liked by her; and she was in the state of
dizzy self-assurance when it seemed easy to win any sympathy she chose
to seek.

For the only other guests--Mrs. Fairford's husband, and the elderly
Charles Bowen who seemed to be her special friend--Undine had no
attention to spare: they remained on a plane with the dim pictures
hanging at her back. She had expected a larger party; but she was
relieved, on the whole, that it was small enough to permit of her
dominating it. Not that she wished to do so by any loudness of
assertion. Her quickness in noting external differences had already
taught her to modulate and lower her voice, and to replace "The I-dea!"
and "I wouldn't wonder" by more polished locutions; and she had not been
ten minutes at table before she found that to seem very much in love,
and a little confused and subdued by the newness and intensity of the
sentiment, was, to the Dagonet mind, the becoming attitude for a young
lady in her situation. The part was not hard to play, for she WAS in
love, of course. It was pleasant, when she looked across the table, to
meet Ralph's grey eyes, with that new look in them, and to feel that she
had kindled it; but I it was only part of her larger pleasure in
the general homage to her beauty, in the sensations of interest and
curiosity excited by everything about her, from the family portraits
overhead to the old Dagonet silver on the table--which were to be hers
too, after all!

The talk, as at Mrs. Fairford's, confused her by its lack of the
personal allusion, its tendency to turn to books, pictures and politics.
"Politics," to Undine, had always been like a kind of back-kitchen to
business--the place where the refuse was thrown and the doubtful messes
were brewed. As a drawing-room topic, and one to provoke disinterested
sentiments, it had the hollowness of Fourth of July orations, and her
mind wandered in spite of the desire to appear informed and competent.

Old Mr. Dagonet, with his reedy staccato voice, that gave polish and
relief to every syllable, tried to come to her aid by questioning her
affably about her family and the friends she had made in New York.
But the caryatid-parent, who exists simply as a filial prop, is not a
fruitful theme, and Undine, called on for the first time to view her own
progenitors as a subject of conversation, was struck by their lack of
points. She had never paused to consider what her father and mother were
"interested" in, and, challenged to specify, could have named--with
sincerity--only herself. On the subject of her New York friends it was
not much easier to enlarge; for so far her circle had grown less rapidly
than she expected. She had fancied Ralph's wooing would at once admit
her to all his social privileges; but he had shown a puzzling reluctance
to introduce her to the Van Degen set, where he came and went with such
familiarity; and the persons he seemed anxious to have her know--a few
frumpy "clever women" of his sister's age, and one or two brisk
old ladies in shabby houses with mahogany furniture and Stuart
portraits--did not offer the opportunities she sought.

"Oh, I don't know many people yet--I tell Ralph he's got to hurry up and
take me round," she said to Mr. Dagonet, with a side-sparkle for Ralph,
whose gaze, between the flowers and lights, she was aware of perpetually
drawing.

"My daughter will take you--you must know his mother's friends," the old
gentleman rejoined while Mrs. Marvell smiled noncommittally.

"But you have a great friend of your own--the lady who takes you into
society," Mr. Dagonet pursued; and Undine had the sense that the
irrepressible Mabel was again "pushing in."

"Oh, yes--Mabel Lipscomb. We were school-mates," she said indifferently.

"Lipscomb? Lipscomb? What is Mr. Lipscomb's occupation?"

"He's a broker," said Undine, glad to be able to place her friend's
husband in so handsome a light. The subtleties of a professional
classification unknown to Apex had already taught her that in New York
it is more distinguished to be a broker than a dentist; and she was
surprised at Mr. Dagonet's lack of enthusiasm.

"Ah? A broker?" He said it almost as Popple might have said "A
DENTIST?" and Undine found herself astray in a new labyrinth of social
distinctions. She felt a sudden contempt for Harry Lipscomb, who had
already struck her as too loud, and irrelevantly comic. "I guess
Mabel'll get a divorce pretty soon," she added, desiring, for personal
reasons, to present Mrs. Lipscomb as favourably as possible.

Mr. Dagonet's handsome eye-brows drew together. "A divorce? H'm--that's
bad. Has he been misbehaving himself?"

Undine looked innocently surprised. "Oh, I guess not. They like each
other well enough. But he's been a disappointment to her. He isn't
in the right set, and I think Mabel realizes she'll never really get
anywhere till she gets rid of him."

These words, uttered in the high fluting tone that she rose to when sure
of her subject, fell on a pause which prolonged and deepened itself to
receive them, while every face at the table, Ralph Marvell's excepted,
reflected in varying degree Mr. Dagonet's pained astonishment.

"But, my dear young lady--what would your friend's situation be if, as
you put it, she 'got rid' of her husband on so trivial a pretext?"

Undine, surprised at his dullness, tried to explain. "Oh that wouldn't
be the reason GIVEN, of course. Any lawyer could fix it up for them.
Don't they generally call it desertion?"

There was another, more palpitating, silence, broken by a laugh from
Ralph.

"RALPH!" his mother breathed; then, turning to Undine, she said with
a constrained smile: "I believe in certain parts of the country
such--unfortunate arrangements--are beginning to be tolerated. But in
New York, in spite of our growing indifference, a divorced woman is
still--thank heaven!--at a decided disadvantage."

Undine's eyes opened wide. Here at last was a topic that really
interested her, and one that gave another amazing glimpse into the
camera obscura of New York society. "Do you mean to say Mabel would be
worse off, then? Couldn't she even go round as much as she does now?"

Mrs. Marvell met this gravely. "It would depend, I should say, on the
kind of people she wished to see."

"Oh, the very best, of course! That would be her only object."

Ralph interposed with another laugh. "You see, Undine, you'd better
think twice before you divorce me!"

"RALPH!" his mother again breathed; but the girl, flushed and sparkling,
flung back: "Oh, it all depends on YOU! Out in Apex, if a girl marries a
man who don't come up to what she expected, people consider it's to her
credit to want to change. YOU'D better think twice of that!"

"If I were only sure of knowing what you expect!" he caught up her joke,
tossing it back at her across the fascinated silence of their listeners.

"Why, EVERYTHING!" she announced--and Mr. Dagonet, turning, laid an
intricately-veined old hand on, hers, and said, with a change of tone
that relaxed the tension of the listeners: "My child, if you look like
that you'll get it."



VIII

It was doubtless owing to Mrs. Fairford's foresight that such
possibilities of tension were curtailed, after dinner, by her carrying
off Ralph and his betrothed to the theatre.

Mr. Dagonet, it was understood, always went to bed after an hour's whist
with his daughter; and the silent Mr. Fairford gave his evenings to
bridge at his club. The party, therefore, consisted only of Undine and
Ralph, with Mrs. Fairford and her attendant friend. Undine vaguely
wondered why the grave and grey-haired Mr. Bowen formed so invariable a
part of that lady's train; but she concluded that it was the York custom
for married ladies to have gentlemen "'round" (as girls had in Apex),
and that Mr. Bowen was the sole survivor of Laura Fairford's earlier
triumphs.

She had, however, little time to give to such conjectures, for the
performance they were attending--the debut of a fashionable London
actress--had attracted a large audience in which Undine immediately
recognized a number of familiar faces. Her engagement had been announced
only the day before, and she had the delicious sense of being "in
all the papers," and of focussing countless glances of interest and
curiosity as she swept through the theatre in Mrs. Fairford's wake.
Their stalls were near the stage, and progress thither was slow enough
to permit of prolonged enjoyment of this sensation. Before passing to
her place she paused for Ralph to remove her cloak, and as he lifted it
from her shoulders she heard a lady say behind her: "There she is--the
one in white, with the lovely back--" and a man answer: "Gad! Where did
he find anything as good as that?"

Anonymous approval was sweet enough; but she was to taste a moment more
exquisite when, in the proscenium box across the house, she saw Clare
Van Degen seated beside the prim figure of Miss Harriet Ray. "They're
here to see me with him--they hate it, but they couldn't keep away!"
She turned and lifted a smile of possessorship to Ralph. Mrs. Fairford
seemed also struck by the presence Of the two ladies, and Undine heard
her whisper to Mr. Bowen: "Do you see Clare over there--and Harriet with
her? Harriet WOULD COME--I call it Spartan! And so like Clare to ask
her!"

Her companion laughed. "It's one of the deepest instincts in human
nature. The murdered are as much given as the murderer to haunting the
scene of the crime."

Doubtless guessing Ralph's desire to have Undine to himself, Mrs.
Fairford had sent the girl in first; and Undine, as she seated herself,
was aware that the occupant of the next stall half turned to her, as
with a vague gesture of recognition. But just then the curtain rose, and
she became absorbed in the development of the drama, especially as it
tended to display the remarkable toilets which succeeded each other on
the person of its leading lady. Undine, seated at Ralph Marvell's side,
and feeling the thrill of his proximity as a subtler element in
the general interest she was exciting, was at last repaid for the
disappointment of her evening at the opera. It was characteristic of her
that she remembered her failures as keenly as her triumphs, and that the
passionate desire to obliterate, to "get even" with them, was always
among the latent incentives of her conduct. Now at last she was having
what she wanted--she was in conscious possession of the "real thing";
and through her other, diffused, sensations Ralph's adoration gave her
such a last refinement of pleasure as might have come to some warrior
Queen borne in triumph by captive princes, and reading in the eyes of
one the passion he dared not speak. When the curtain fell this vague
enjoyment was heightened by various acts of recognition. All the people
she wanted to "go with," as they said in Apex, seemed to be about her
in the stalls and boxes; and her eyes continued to revert with special
satisfaction to the incongruous group formed by Mrs. Peter Van Degen and
Miss Ray. The sight made it irresistible to whisper to Ralph: "You ought
to go round and talk to your cousin. Have you told her we're engaged?"

"Clare? of course. She's going to call on you tomorrow."

"Oh, she needn't put herself out--she's never been yet," said Undine
loftily.

He made no rejoinder, but presently asked: "Who's that you're waving
to?"

"Mr. Popple. He's coming round to see us. You know he wants to paint
me." Undine fluttered and beamed as the brilliant Popple made his way
across the stalls to the seat which her neighbour had momentarily left.

"First-rate chap next to you--whoever he is--to give me this chance,"
the artist declared. "Ha, Ralph, my boy, how did you pull it off? That's
what we're all of us wondering." He leaned over to give Marvell's hand
the ironic grasp of celibacy. "Well, you've left us lamenting: he has,
you know. Miss Spragg. But I've got one pull over the others--I can
paint you! He can't forbid that, can he? Not before marriage, anyhow!"

Undine divided her shining glances between the two. "I guess he isn't
going to treat me any different afterward," she proclaimed with joyous
defiance.

"Ah, well, there's no telling, you know. Hadn't we better begin at once?
Seriously, I want awfully to get you into the spring show."

"Oh, really? That would be too lovely!"

"YOU would be, certainly--the way I mean to do you. But I see Ralph
getting glum. Cheer up, my dear fellow; I daresay you'll be invited to
some of the sittings--that's for Miss Spragg to say.--Ah, here comes
your neighbour back, confound him--You'll let me know when we can
begin?"

As Popple moved away Undine turned eagerly to Marvell. "Do you suppose
there's time? I'd love to have him to do me!"

Ralph smiled. "My poor child--he WOULD 'do' you, with a vengeance.
Infernal cheek, his asking you to sit--"

She stared. "But why? He's painted your cousin, and all the smart
women."

"Oh, if a 'smart' portrait's all you want!"

"I want what the others want," she answered, frowning and pouting a
little. She was already beginning to resent in Ralph the slightest sign
of resistance to her pleasure; and her resentment took the form--a
familiar one in Apex courtships--of turning on him, in the next
entr'acte, a deliberately averted shoulder. The result of this was to
bring her, for the first time, in more direct relation to her other
neighbour. As she turned he turned too, showing her, above a shining
shirt-front fastened with a large imitation pearl, a ruddy plump snub
face without an angle in it, which yet looked sharper than a razor.
Undine's eyes met his with a startled look, and for a long moment they
remained suspended on each other's stare.

Undine at length shrank back with an unrecognizing face; but her
movement made her opera-glass slip to the floor, and her neighbour bent
down and picked it up.

"Well--don't you know me yet?" he said with a slight smile, as he
restored the glass to her.

She had grown white to the lips, and when she tried to speak the effort
produced only a faint click in her throat. She felt that the change in
her appearance must be visible, and the dread of letting Marvell see it
made her continue to turn her ravaged face to her other neighbour.
The round black eyes set prominently in the latter's round glossy
countenance had expressed at first only an impersonal and slightly
ironic interest; but a look of surprise grew in them as Undine's silence
continued.

"What's the matter? Don't you want me to speak to you?"

She became aware that Marvell, as if unconscious of her slight show of
displeasure, had left his seat, and was making his way toward the aisle;
and this assertion of independence, which a moment before she would so
deeply have resented, now gave her a feeling of intense relief.

"No--don't speak to me, please. I'll tell you another time--I'll
write." Her neighbour continued to gaze at her, forming his lips into a
noiseless whistle under his small dark moustache.

"Well, I--That's about the stiffest," he murmured; and as she made no
answer he added: "Afraid I'll ask to be introduced to your friend?"

She made a faint movement of entreaty. "I can't explain. I promise to
see you; but I ASK you not to talk to me now."

He unfolded his programme, and went on speaking in a low tone while he
affected to study it. "Anything to oblige, of course. That's always been
my motto. But is it a bargain--fair and square? You'll see me?"

She receded farther from him. "I promise. I--I WANT to," she faltered.

"All right, then. Call me up in the morning at the Driscoll Building.
Seven-o-nine--got it?"

She nodded, and he added in a still lower tone: "I suppose I can
congratulate you, anyhow?" and then, without waiting for her reply,
turned to study Mrs. Van Degen's box through his opera-glass. Clare, as
if aware of the scrutiny fixed on her from below leaned back and threw a
question over her shoulder to Ralph Marvell, who had just seated himself
behind her.

"Who's the funny man with the red face talking to Miss Spragg?"

Ralph bent forward. "The man next to her? Never saw him before. But I
think you're mistaken: she's not speaking to him."

"She WAS--Wasn't she, Harriet?"

Miss Ray pinched her lips together without speaking, and Mrs. Van Degen
paused for the fraction of a second. "Perhaps he's an Apex friend," she
then suggested.

"Very likely. Only I think she'd have introduced him if he had been."

His cousin faintly shrugged. "Shall you encourage that?"

Peter Van Degen, who had strayed into his wife's box for a moment,
caught the colloquy, and lifted his opera-glass.

"The fellow next to Miss Spragg? (By George, Ralph, she's ripping
to-night!) Wait a minute--I know his face. Saw him in old Harmon
Driscoll's office the day of the Eubaw Mine meeting. This chap's his
secretary, or something. Driscoll called him in to give some facts to
the directors, and he seemed a mighty wide-awake customer."

Clare Van Degen turned gaily to her cousin. "If he has anything to
do with the Driscolls you'd better cultivate him! That's the kind of
acquaintance the Dagonets have always needed. I married to set them an
example!"

Ralph rose with a laugh. "You're right. I'll hurry back and make
his acquaintance." He held out his hand to his cousin, avoiding her
disappointed eyes.

Undine, on entering her bedroom late that evening, was startled by the
presence of a muffled figure which revealed itself, through the dimness,
as the ungirded midnight outline of Mrs. Spragg.

"MOTHER? What on earth--?" the girl exclaimed, as Mrs. Spragg pressed
the electric button and flooded the room with light. The idea of a
mother's sitting up for her daughter was so foreign to Apex customs
that it roused only mistrust and irritation in the object of the
demonstration.

Mrs. Spragg came forward deprecatingly to lift the cloak from her
daughter's shoulders.

"I just HAD to, Undie--I told father I HAD to. I wanted to hear all
about it."

Undine shrugged away from her. "Mercy! At this hour? You'll be as white
as a sheet to-morrow, sitting up all night like this."

She moved toward the toilet-table, and began to demolish with feverish
hands the structure which Mrs. Heeny, a few hours earlier, had so
lovingly raised. But the rose caught in a mesh of hair, and Mrs. Spragg,
venturing timidly to release it, had a full view of her daughter's face
in the glass.

"Why, Undie, YOU'RE as white as a sheet now! You look fairly sick.
What's the matter, daughter?"

The girl broke away from her.

"Oh, can't you leave me alone, mother? There--do I look white NOW?" she
cried, the blood flaming into her pale cheeks; and as Mrs. Spragg
shrank back, she added more mildly, in the tone of a parent rebuking a
persistent child: "It's enough to MAKE anybody sick to be stared at that
way!"

Mrs. Spragg overflowed with compunction. "I'm so sorry, Undie. I guess
it was just seeing you in this glare of light."

"Yes--the light's awful; do turn some off," ordered Undine, for whom,
ordinarily, no radiance was too strong; and Mrs. Spragg, grateful to
have commands laid upon her, hastened to obey.

Undine, after this, submitted in brooding silence to having her dress
unlaced, and her slippers and dressing-gown brought to her. Mrs. Spragg
visibly yearned to say more, but she restrained the impulse lest it
should provoke her dismissal.

"Won't you take just a sup of milk before you go to bed?" she suggested
at length, as Undine sank into an armchair.

"I've got some for you right here in the parlour."

Without looking up the girl answered: "No. I don't want anything. Do go
to bed."

Her mother seemed to be struggling between the life-long instinct
of obedience and a swift unformulated fear. "I'm going, Undie." She
wavered. "Didn't they receive you right, daughter?" she asked with
sudden resolution.

"What nonsense! How should they receive me? Everybody was lovely to me."
Undine rose to her feet and went on with her undressing, tossing her
clothes on the floor and shaking her hair over her bare shoulders.

Mrs. Spragg stooped to gather up the scattered garments as they fell,
folding them with a wistful caressing touch, and laying them on the
lounge, without daring to raise her eyes to her daughter. It was not
till she heard Undine throw herself on the bed that she went toward her
and drew the coverlet up with deprecating hands.

"Oh, do put the light out--I'm dead tired," the girl grumbled, pressing
her face into the pillow.

Mrs. Spragg turned away obediently; then, gathering all her scattered
impulses into a passionate act of courage, she moved back to the
bedside.

"Undie--you didn't see anybody--I mean at the theatre? ANYBODY YOU
DIDN'T WANT TO SEE?"

Undine, at the question, raised her head and started right against
the tossed pillows, her white exasperated face close to her mother's
twitching features. The two women examined each other a moment, fear
and anger in their crossed glances; then Undine answered: "No, nobody.
Good-night."



IX

Undine, late the next day, waited alone under the leafless trellising of
a wistaria arbour on the west side of the Central Park. She had put on
her plainest dress, and wound a closely, patterned veil over her least
vivid hat; but even thus toned down to the situation she was conscious
of blazing out from it inconveniently.

The habit of meeting young men in sequestered spots was not unknown to
her: the novelty was in feeling any embarrassment about it. Even now
she--was disturbed not so much by the unlikely chance of an accidental
encounter with Ralph Marvell as by the remembrance of similar meetings,
far from accidental, with the romantic Aaronson. Could it be that the
hand now adorned with Ralph's engagement ring had once, in this very
spot, surrendered itself to the riding-master's pressure? At the thought
a wave of physical disgust passed over her, blotting out another memory
as distasteful but more remote.

It was revived by the appearance of a ruddy middle-sized young man, his
stoutish figure tightly buttoned into a square-shouldered over-coat, who
presently approached along the path that led to the arbour. Silhouetted
against the slope of the asphalt, the newcomer revealed an outline thick
yet compact, with a round head set on a neck in which, at the first
chance, prosperity would be likely to develop a red crease. His face,
with its rounded surfaces, and the sanguine innocence of a complexion
belied by prematurely astute black eyes, had a look of jovial cunning
which Undine had formerly thought "smart" but which now struck her as
merely vulgar. She felt that in the Marvell set Elmer Moffatt would have
been stamped as "not a gentleman." Nevertheless something in his look
seemed to promise the capacity to develop into any character he might
care to assume; though it did not seem probable that, for the present,
that of a gentleman would be among them. He had always had a brisk
swaggering step, and the faintly impudent tilt of the head that she had
once thought "dashing"; but whereas this look had formerly denoted
a somewhat desperate defiance of the world and its judgments it now
suggested an almost assured relation to these powers; and Undine's heart
sank at the thought of what the change implied.

As he drew nearer, the young man's air of assurance was replaced by an
expression of mildly humorous surprise.

"Well--this is white of you. Undine!" he said, taking her lifeless
fingers into his dapperly gloved hand.

Through her veil she formed the words: "I said I'd come."

He laughed. "That's so. And you see I believed you. Though I might not
have--"

"I don't see the use of beginning like this," she interrupted nervously.

"That's so too. Suppose we walk along a little ways? It's rather chilly
standing round."

He turned down the path that descended toward the Ramble and the girl
moved on beside him with her long flowing steps.

When they had reached the comparative shelter of the interlacing trees
Moffatt paused again to say: "If we're going to talk I'd like to see
you. Undine;" and after a first moment of reluctance she submissively
threw back her veil.

He let his eyes rest on her in silence; then he said judicially: "You've
filled out some; but you're paler." After another appreciative scrutiny
he added: "There's mighty few women as well worth looking at, and I'm
obliged to you for letting me have the chance again."

Undine's brows drew together, but she softened her frown to a quivering
smile.

"I'm glad to see you too, Elmer--I am, REALLY!"

He returned her smile while his glance continued to study her
humorously. "You didn't betray the fact last night. Miss Spragg."

"I was so taken aback. I thought you were out in Alaska somewhere."

The young man shaped his lips into the mute whistle by which he
habitually vented his surprise. "You DID? Didn't Abner E. Spragg tell
you he'd seen me down town?"

Undine gave him a startled glance. "Father? Why, have you seen him? He
never said a word about it!"

Her companion's whistle became audible. "He's running yet!" he said
gaily. "I wish I could scare some people as easy as I can your father."

The girl hesitated. "I never felt toward you the way father did," she
hazarded at length; and he gave her another long look in return.

"Well, if they'd left you alone I don't believe you'd ever have acted
mean to me," was the conclusion he drew from it.

"I didn't mean to, Elmer ... I give you my word--but I was so young ...
I didn't know anything...."

His eyes had a twinkle of reminiscent pleasantry. "No--I don't suppose
it WOULD teach a girl much to be engaged two years to a stiff like
Millard Binch; and that was about all that had happened to you before I
came along."

Undine flushed to the forehead. "Oh, Elmer--I was only a child when I
was engaged to Millard--"

"That's a fact. And you went on being one a good while afterward. The
Apex Eagle always head-lined you 'The child-bride'--"

"I can't see what's the use--now--."

"That ruled out of court too? See here. Undine--what CAN we talk about?
I understood that was what we were here for."

"Of course." She made an effort at recovery. "I only meant to
say--what's the use of raking up things that are over?"

"Rake up? That's the idea, is it? Was that why you tried to cut me last
night?"

"I--oh, Elmer! I didn't mean to; only, you see, I'm engaged."

"Oh, I saw that fast enough. I'd have seen it even if I didn't read the
papers." He gave a short laugh. "He was feeling pretty good, sitting
there alongside of you, wasn't he? I don't wonder he was. I remember.
But I don't see that that was a reason for cold-shouldering me. I'm
a respectable member of society now--I'm one of Harmon B. Driscoll's
private secretaries." He brought out the fact with mock solemnity.

But to Undine, though undoubtedly impressive, the statement did not
immediately present itself as a subject for pleasantry.

"Elmer Moffatt--you ARE?"

He laughed again. "Guess you'd have remembered me last night if you'd
known it."

She was following her own train of thought with a look of pale
intensity. "You're LIVING in New York, then--you're going to live here
right along?"

"Well, it looks that way; as long as I can hang on to this job. Great
men always gravitate to the metropolis. And I gravitated here just as
Uncle Harmon B. was looking round for somebody who could give him an
inside tip on the Eubaw mine deal--you know the Driscolls are
pretty deep in Eubaw. I happened to go out there after our little
unpleasantness at Apex, and it was just the time the deal went through.
So in one way your folks did me a good turn when they made Apex too hot
for me: funny to think of, ain't it?"

Undine, recovering herself, held out her hand impulsively.

"I'm real glad of it--I mean I'm real glad you've had such a stroke of
luck!"

"Much obliged," he returned. "By the way, you might mention the fact to
Abner E. Spragg next time you run across him."

"Father'll be real glad too, Elmer." She hesitated, and then went on:
"You must see now that it was natural father and mother should have felt
the way they did--"

"Oh, the only thing that struck me as unnatural was their making you
feel so too. But I'm free to admit I wasn't a promising case in those
days." His glance played over her for a moment. "Say, Undine--it was
good while it lasted, though, wasn't it?"

She shrank back with a burning face and eyes of misery.

"Why, what's the matter? That ruled out too? Oh, all right. Look at
here, Undine, suppose you let me know what you ARE here to talk about,
anyhow."

She cast a helpless glance down the windings of the wooded glen in which
they had halted.

"Just to ask you--to beg you--not to say anything of this kind
again--EVER--"

"Anything about you and me?"

She nodded mutely.

"Why, what's wrong? Anybody been saying anything against me?"

"Oh, no. It's not that!"

"What on earth is it, then--except that you're ashamed of me, one way
or another?" She made no answer, and he stood digging the tip of his
walking-stick into a fissure of the asphalt. At length he went on in a
tone that showed a first faint trace of irritation: "I don't want to
break into your gilt-edged crowd, if it's that you're scared of."

His tone seemed to increase her distress. "No, no--you don't understand.
All I want is that nothing shall be known."

"Yes; but WHY? It was all straight enough, if you come to that."

"It doesn't matter ... whether it was straight ... or ... not ..." He
interpolated a whistle which made her add: "What I mean is that out here
in the East they don't even like it if a girl's been ENGAGED before."

This last strain on his credulity wrung a laugh from Moffatt. "Gee!
How'd they expect her fair young life to pass? Playing 'Holy City' on
the melodeon, and knitting tidies for church fairs?"

"Girls are looked after here. It's all different. Their mothers go round
with them."

This increased her companion's hilarity and he glanced about him with a
pretense of compunction. "Excuse ME! I ought to have remembered. Where's
your chaperon, Miss Spragg?" He crooked his arm with mock ceremony.
"Allow me to escort you to the bew-fay. You see I'm onto the New York
style myself."

A sigh of discouragement escaped her. "Elmer--if you really believe I
never wanted to act mean to you, don't you act mean to me now!"

"Act mean?" He grew serious again and moved nearer to her. "What is it
you want, Undine? Why can't you say it right out?"

"What I told you. I don't want Ralph Marvell--or any of them--to know
anything. If any of his folks found out, they'd never let him marry
me--never! And he wouldn't want to: he'd be so horrified. And it would
KILL me, Elmer--it would just kill me!"

She pressed close to him, forgetful of her new reserves and repugnances,
and impelled by the passionate absorbing desire to wring from him some
definite pledge of safety.

"Oh, Elmer, if you ever liked me, help me now, and I'll help you if I
get the chance!"

He had recovered his coolness as hers forsook her, and stood his ground
steadily, though her entreating hands, her glowing face, were near
enough to have shaken less sturdy nerves.

"That so, Puss? You just ask me to pass the sponge over Elmer Moffatt of
Apex City? Cut the gentleman when we meet? That the size of it?"

"Oh, Elmer, it's my first chance--I can't lose it!" she broke out,
sobbing.

"Nonsense, child! Of course you shan't. Here, look up. Undine--why, I
never saw you cry before. Don't you be afraid of me--_I_ ain't going to
interrupt the wedding march." He began to whistle a bar of Lohengrin. "I
only just want one little promise in return."

She threw a startled look at him and he added reassuringly: "Oh, don't
mistake me. I don't want to butt into your set--not for social purposes,
anyhow; but if ever it should come handy to know any of 'em in a
business way, would you fix it up for me--AFTER YOU'RE MARRIED?'"

Their eyes met, and she remained silent for a tremulous moment or two;
then she held out her hand. "Afterward--yes. I promise. And YOU promise,
Elmer?"

"Oh, to have and to hold!" he sang out, swinging about to follow her as
she hurriedly began to retrace her steps.

The March twilight had fallen, and the Stentorian facade was all aglow,
when Undine regained its monumental threshold. She slipped through the
marble vestibule and soared skyward in the mirror-lined lift, hardly
conscious of the direction she was taking. What she wanted was solitude,
and the time to put some order into her thoughts; and she hoped to steal
into her room without meeting her mother. Through her thick veil the
clusters of lights in the Spragg drawing-room dilated and flowed
together in a yellow blur, from which, as she entered, a figure detached
itself; and with a start of annoyance she saw Ralph Marvell rise from
the perusal of the "fiction number" of a magazine which had replaced
"The Hound of the Baskervilles" on the onyx table.

"Yes; you told me not to come--and here I am." He lifted her hand to his
lips as his eyes tried to find hers through the veil.

She drew back with a nervous gesture. "I told you I'd be awfully late."

"I know--trying on! And you're horribly tired, and wishing with all your
might I wasn't here."

"I'm not so sure I'm not!" she rejoined, trying to hide her vexation in
a smile.

"What a tragic little voice! You really are done up. I couldn't help
dropping in for a minute; but of course if you say so I'll be off." She
was removing her long gloves and he took her hands and drew her close.
"Only take off your veil, and let me see you."

A quiver of resistance ran through her: he felt it and dropped her
hands.

"Please don't tease. I never could bear it," she stammered, drawing
away.

"Till to-morrow, then; that is, if the dress-makers permit."

She forced a laugh. "If I showed myself now you might not come back
to-morrow. I look perfectly hideous--it was so hot and they kept me so
long."

"All to make yourself more beautiful for a man who's blind with your
beauty already?"

The words made her smile, and moving nearer she bent her head and stood
still while he undid her veil. As he put it back their lips met, and his
look of passionate tenderness was incense to her.

But the next moment his expression passed from worship to concern.
"Dear! Why, what's the matter? You've been crying!"

She put both hands to her hat in the instinctive effort to hide her
face. His persistence was as irritating as her mother's.

"I told you it was frightfully hot--and all my things were horrid; and
it made me so cross and nervous!" She turned to the looking-glass with a
feint of smoothing her hair.

Marvell laid his hand on her arm, "I can't bear to see you so done up.
Why can't we be married to-morrow, and escape all these ridiculous
preparations? I shall hate your fine clothes if they're going to make
you so miserable."

She dropped her hands, and swept about on him, her face lit up by a new
idea. He was extraordinarily handsome and appealing, and her heart began
to beat faster.

"I hate it all too! I wish we COULD be married right away!"

Marvell caught her to him joyously. "Dearest--dearest! Don't, if you
don't mean it! The thought's too glorious!"

Undine lingered in his arms, not with any intent of tenderness, but as
if too deeply lost in a new train of thought to be conscious of his
hold.

"I suppose most of the things COULD be got ready sooner--if I said they
MUST," she brooded, with a fixed gaze that travelled past him. "And the
rest--why shouldn't the rest be sent over to Europe after us? I want to
go straight off with you, away from everything--ever so far away,
where there'll be nobody but you and me alone!" She had a flash of
illumination which made her turn her lips to his.

"Oh, my darling--my darling!" Marvell whispered.



X

Mr. and Mrs. Spragg were both given to such long periods of ruminating
apathy that the student of inheritance might have wondered whence Undine
derived her overflowing activity. The answer would have been obtained
by observing her father's business life. From the moment he set foot
in Wall Street Mr. Spragg became another man. Physically the change
revealed itself only by the subtlest signs. As he steered his way to his
office through the jostling crowd of William Street his relaxed muscles
did not grow more taut or his lounging gait less desultory. His
shoulders were hollowed by the usual droop, and his rusty black
waistcoat showed the same creased concavity at the waist, the same
flabby prominence below. It was only in his face that the difference was
perceptible, though even here it rather lurked behind the features than
openly modified them: showing itself now and then in the cautious glint
of half-closed eyes, the forward thrust of black brows, or a tightening
of the lax lines of the mouth--as the gleam of a night-watchman's light
might flash across the darkness of a shuttered house-front. The shutters
were more tightly barred than usual, when, on a morning some two
weeks later than the date of the incidents last recorded, Mr. Spragg
approached the steel and concrete tower in which his office occupied a
lofty pigeon-hole. Events had moved rapidly and somewhat surprisingly in
the interval, and Mr. Spragg had already accustomed himself to the fact
that his daughter was to be married within the week, instead of awaiting
the traditional post-Lenten date. Conventionally the change meant little
to him; but on the practical side it presented unforeseen difficulties.
Mr. Spragg had learned within the last weeks that a New York marriage
involved material obligations unknown to Apex. Marvell, indeed, had
been loftily careless of such questions; but his grandfather, on the
announcement of the engagement, had called on Mr. Spragg and put before
him, with polished precision, the young man's financial situation.

Mr. Spragg, at the moment, had been inclined to deal with his visitor in
a spirit of indulgent irony. As he leaned back in his revolving chair,
with feet adroitly balanced against a tilted scrap basket, his air of
relaxed power made Mr. Dagonet's venerable elegance seem as harmless as
that of an ivory jack-straw--and his first replies to his visitor were
made with the mildness of a kindly giant.

"Ralph don't make a living out of the law, you say? No, it didn't strike
me he'd be likely to, from the talks I've had with him. Fact is, the
law's a business that wants--" Mr. Spragg broke off, checked by a
protest from Mr. Dagonet. "Oh, a PROFESSION, you call it? It ain't a
business?" His smile grew more indulgent as this novel distinction
dawned on him. "Why, I guess that's the whole trouble with Ralph. Nobody
expects to make money in a PROFESSION; and if you've taught him to
regard the law that way, he'd better go right into cooking-stoves and
done with it."

Mr. Dagonet, within a narrower range, had his own play of humour; and it
met Mr. Spragg's with a leap. "It's because I knew he would manage to
make cooking-stoves as unremunerative as a profession that I saved him
from so glaring a failure by putting him into the law."

The retort drew a grunt of amusement from Mr. Spragg; and the eyes of
the two men met in unexpected understanding.

"That so? What can he do, then?" the future father-in-law enquired.

"He can write poetry--at least he tells me he can." Mr. Dagonet
hesitated, as if aware of the inadequacy of the alternative, and then
added: "And he can count on three thousand a year from me."

Mr. Spragg tilted himself farther back without disturbing his
subtly-calculated relation to the scrap basket.

"Does it cost anything like that to print his poetry?"

Mr. Dagonet smiled again: he was clearly enjoying his visit. "Dear,
no--he doesn't go in for 'luxe' editions. And now and then he gets ten
dollars from a magazine."

Mr. Spragg mused. "Wasn't he ever TAUGHT to work?"

"No; I really couldn't have afforded that."

"I see. Then they've got to live on two hundred and fifty dollars a
month."

Mr. Dagonet remained pleasantly unmoved. "Does it cost anything like
that to buy your daughter's dresses?"

A subterranean chuckle agitated the lower folds of Mr. Spragg's
waistcoat.

"I might put him in the way of something--I guess he's smart enough."

Mr. Dagonet made a gesture of friendly warning. "It will pay us both in
the end to keep him out of business," he said, rising as if to show that
his mission was accomplished.

The results of this friendly conference had been more serious than
Mr. Spragg could have foreseen--and the victory remained with his
antagonist. It had not entered into Mr. Spragg's calculations that he
would have to give his daughter any fixed income on her marriage. He
meant that she should have the "handsomest" wedding the New York press
had ever celebrated, and her mother's fancy was already afloat on a sea
of luxuries--a motor, a Fifth Avenue house, and a tiara that should
out-blaze Mrs. Van Degen's; but these were movable benefits, to be
conferred whenever Mr. Spragg happened to be "on the right side" of the
market. It was a different matter to be called on, at such short notice,
to bridge the gap between young Marvell's allowance and Undine's
requirements; and her father's immediate conclusion was that the
engagement had better be broken off. Such scissions were almost painless
in Apex, and he had fancied it would be easy, by an appeal to the girl's
pride, to make her see that she owed it to herself to do better.

"You'd better wait awhile and look round again," was the way he had put
it to her at the opening of the talk of which, even now, he could not
recall the close without a tremor.

Undine, when she took his meaning, had been terrible. Everything had
gone down before her, as towns and villages went down before one of the
tornadoes of her native state. Wait awhile? Look round? Did he suppose
she was marrying for MONEY? Didn't he see it was all a question, now
and here, of the kind of people she wanted to "go with"? Did he want
to throw her straight back into the Lipscomb set, to have her marry a
dentist and live in a West Side flat? Why hadn't they stayed in Apex, if
that was all he thought she was fit for? She might as well have married
Millard Binch, instead of handing him over to Indiana Frusk! Couldn't
her father understand that nice girls, in New York, didn't regard
getting married like going on a buggy-ride? It was enough to ruin a
girl's chances if she broke her engagement to a man in Ralph Marvell's
set. All kinds of spiteful things would be said about her, and she would
never be able to go with the right people again. They had better go back
to Apex right off--it was they and not SHE who had wanted to leave Apex,
anyhow--she could call her mother to witness it. She had always, when it
came to that, done what her father and mother wanted, but she'd given
up trying to make out what they were after, unless it was to make her
miserable; and if that was it, hadn't they had enough of it by this
time? She had, anyhow. But after this she meant to lead her own life;
and they needn't ask her where she was going, or what she meant to do,
because this time she'd die before she told them--and they'd made life
so hateful to her that she only wished she was dead already.

Mr. Spragg heard her out in silence, pulling at his beard with one
sallow wrinkled hand, while the other dragged down the armhole of his
waistcoat. Suddenly he looked up and said: "Ain't you in love with the
fellow, Undie?"

The girl glared back at him, her splendid brows beetling like an
Amazon's. "Do you think I'd care a cent for all the rest of it if I
wasn't?"

"Well, if you are, you and he won't mind beginning in a small way."

Her look poured contempt on his ignorance. "Do you s'pose I'd drag him
down?" With a magnificent gesture she tore Marvell's ring from her
finger. "I'll send this back this minute. I'll tell him I thought he
was a rich man, and now I see I'm mistaken--" She burst into shattering
sobs, rocking her beautiful body back and forward in all the abandonment
of young grief; and her father stood over her, stroking her shoulder and
saying helplessly: "I'll see what I can do, Undine--"

All his life, and at ever-diminishing intervals, Mr. Spragg had been
called on by his womenkind to "see what he could do"; and the seeing had
almost always resulted as they wished. Undine did not have to send back
her ring, and in her state of trance-like happiness she hardly asked by
what means her path had been smoothed, but merely accepted her mother's
assurance that "father had fixed everything all right."

Mr. Spragg accepted the situation also. A son-in-law who expected to
be pensioned like a Grand Army veteran was a phenomenon new to his
experience; but if that was what Undine wanted she should have it. Only
two days later, however, he was met by a new demand--the young people
had decided to be married "right off," instead of waiting till June.
This change of plan was made known to Mr. Spragg at a moment when he was
peculiarly unprepared for the financial readjustment it necessitated. He
had always declared himself able to cope with any crisis if Undine and
her mother would "go steady"; but he now warned them of his inability to
keep up with the new pace they had set. Undine, not deigning to return
to the charge, had commissioned her mother to speak for her; and Mr.
Spragg was surprised to meet in his wife a firmness as inflexible as his
daughter's.

"I can't do it, Loot--can't put my hand on the cash," he had protested;
but Mrs. Spragg fought him inch by inch, her back to the wall--flinging
out at last, as he pressed her closer: "Well, if you want to know, she's
seen Elmer."

The bolt reached its mark, and her husband turned an agitated face on
her.

"Elmer? What on earth--he didn't come HERE?"

"No; but he sat next to her the other night at the theatre, and she's
wild with us for not having warned her."

Mr. Spragg's scowl drew his projecting brows together. "Warned her of
what? What's Elmer to her? Why's she afraid of Elmer Moffatt?"

"She's afraid of his talking."

"Talking? What on earth can he say that'll hurt HER?"

"Oh, I don't know," Mrs. Spragg wailed. "She's so nervous I can hardly
get a word out of her."

Mr. Spragg's whitening face showed the touch of a new fear. "Is she
afraid he'll get round her again--make up to her? Is that what she
means by 'talking'?" "I don't know, I don't know. I only know she is
afraid--she's afraid as death of him."

For a long interval they sat silently looking at each other while their
heavy eyes exchanged conjectures: then Mr. Spragg rose from his chair,
saying, as he took up his hat: "Don't you fret, Leota; I'll see what I
can do."

He had been "seeing" now for an arduous fortnight; and the strain on his
vision had resulted in a state of tension such as he had not undergone
since the epic days of the Pure Water Move at Apex. It was not his habit
to impart his fears to Mrs. Spragg and Undine, and they continued the
bridal preparations, secure in their invariable experience that, once
"father" had been convinced of the impossibility of evading their
demands, he might be trusted to satisfy them by means with which his
womenkind need not concern themselves. Mr. Spragg, as he approached his
office on the morning in question, felt reasonably sure of fulfilling
these expectations; but he reflected that a few more such victories
would mean disaster.

He entered the vast marble vestibule of the Ararat Trust Building and
walked toward the express elevator that was to carry him up to his
office. At the door of the elevator a man turned to him, and he
recognized Elmer Moffatt, who put out his hand with an easy gesture.

Mr. Spragg did not ignore the gesture: he did not even withhold his
hand. In his code the cut, as a conscious sign of disapproval, did not
exist. In the south, if you had a grudge against a man you tried to
shoot him; in the west, you tried to do him in a mean turn in business;
but in neither region was the cut among the social weapons of offense.
Mr. Spragg, therefore, seeing Moffatt in his path, extended a lifeless
hand while he faced the young man scowlingly. Moffatt met the hand and
the scowl with equal coolness.

"Going up to your office? I was on my way there."

The elevator door rolled back, and Mr. Spragg, entering it, found his
companion at his side. They remained silent during the ascent to Mr.
Spragg's threshold; but there the latter turned to enquire ironically of
Moffatt: "Anything left to say?"

Moffatt smiled. "Nothing LEFT--no; I'm carrying a whole new line of
goods."

Mr. Spragg pondered the reply; then he opened the door and suffered
Moffatt to follow him in. Behind an inner glazed enclosure, with its one
window dimmed by a sooty perspective barred with chimneys, he seated
himself at a dusty littered desk, and groped instinctively for the
support of the scrap basket. Moffatt, uninvited, dropped into the
nearest chair, and Mr. Spragg said, after another silence: "I'm pretty
busy this morning."

"I know you are: that's why I'm here," Moffatt serenely answered. He
leaned back, crossing his legs, and twisting his small stiff moustache
with a plump hand adorned by a cameo.

"Fact is," he went on, "this is a coals-of-fire call. You think I owe
you a grudge, and I'm going to show you I'm not that kind. I'm going
to put you onto a good thing--oh, not because I'm so fond of you; just
because it happens to hit my sense of a joke."

While Moffatt talked Mr. Spragg took up the pile of letters on his desk
and sat shuffling them like a pack of cards. He dealt them deliberately
to two imaginary players; then he pushed them aside and drew out his
watch.

"All right--I carry one too," said the young man easily. "But you'll
find it's time gained to hear what I've got to say."

Mr. Spragg considered the vista of chimneys without speaking, and
Moffatt continued: "I don't suppose you care to hear the story of my
life, so I won't refer you to the back numbers. You used to say out in
Apex that I spent too much time loafing round the bar of the Mealey
House; that was one of the things you had against me. Well, maybe I
did--but it taught me to talk, and to listen to the other fellows too.
Just at present I'm one of Harmon B. Driscoll's private secretaries, and
some of that Mealey House loafing has come in more useful than any job I
ever put my hand to. The old man happened to hear I knew something about
the inside of the Eubaw deal, and took me on to have the information
where he could get at it. I've given him good talk for his money;
but I've done some listening too. Eubaw ain't the only commodity the
Driscolls deal in."

Mr. Spragg restored his watch to his pocket and shifted his drowsy gaze
from the window to his visitor's face.

"Yes," said Moffatt, as if in reply to the movement, "the Driscolls are
getting busy out in Apex. Now they've got all the street railroads in
their pocket they want the water-supply too--but you know that as well
as I do. Fact is, they've got to have it; and there's where you and I
come in."

Mr. Spragg thrust his hands in his waistcoat arm-holes and turned his
eyes back to the window.

"I'm out of that long ago," he said indifferently.

"Sure," Moffatt acquiesced; "but you know what went on when you were in
it."

"Well?" said Mr. Spragg, shifting one hand to the Masonic emblem on his
watch-chain.

"Well, Representative James J. Rolliver, who was in it with you, ain't
out of it yet. He's the man the Driscolls are up against. What d'you
know about him?"

Mr. Spragg twirled the emblem thoughtfully. "Driscoll tell you to come
here?"

Moffatt laughed. "No, SIR--not by a good many miles."

Mr. Spragg removed his feet from the scrap basket and straightened
himself in his chair.

"Well--I didn't either; good morning, Mr. Moffatt."

The young man stared a moment, a humorous glint in his small black eyes;
but he made no motion to leave his seat. "Undine's to be married next
week, isn't she?" he asked in a conversational tone.

Mr. Spragg's face blackened and he swung about in his revolving chair.

"You go to--"

Moffatt raised a deprecating hand. "Oh, you needn't warn me off. I
don't want to be invited to the wedding. And I don't want to forbid the
banns."

There was a derisive sound in Mr. Spragg's throat.

"But I DO want to get out of Driscoll's office," Moffatt imperturbably
continued. "There's no future there for a fellow like me. I see things
big. That's the reason Apex was too tight a fit for me. It's only
the little fellows that succeed in little places. New York's my
size--without a single alteration. I could prove it to you to-morrow if
I could put my hand on fifty thousand dollars."

Mr. Spragg did not repeat his gesture of dismissal: he was once more
listening guardedly but intently. Moffatt saw it and continued.

"And I could put my hand on double that sum--yes, sir, DOUBLE--if you'd
just step round with me to old Driscoll's office before five P. M. See
the connection, Mr. Spragg?"

The older man remained silent while his visitor hummed a bar or two of
"In the Gloaming"; then he said: "You want me to tell Driscoll what I
know about James J. Rolliver?"

"I want you to tell the truth--I want you to stand for political purity
in your native state. A man of your prominence owes it to the community,
sir," cried Moffatt. Mr. Spragg was still tormenting his Masonic emblem.

"Rolliver and I always stood together," he said at last, with a tinge of
reluctance.

"Well, how much have you made out of it? Ain't he always been ahead of
the game?"

"I can't do it--I can't do it," said Mr. Spragg, bringing his clenched
hand down on the desk, as if addressing an invisible throng of
assailants.

Moffatt rose without any evidence of disappointment in his ruddy
countenance. "Well, so long," he said, moving toward the door. Near
the threshold he paused to add carelessly: "Excuse my referring to a
personal matter--but I understand Miss Spragg's wedding takes place next
Monday."

Mr. Spragg was silent.

"How's that?" Moffatt continued unabashed. "I saw in the papers the date
was set for the end of June."

Mr. Spragg rose heavily from his seat. "I presume my daughter has her
reasons," he said, moving toward the door in Moffatt's wake.

"I guess she has--same as I have for wanting you to step round with me
to old Driscoll's. If Undine's reasons are as good as mine--"

"Stop right here, Elmer Moffatt!" the older man broke out with lifted
hand. Moffatt made a burlesque feint of evading a blow; then his face
grew serious, and he moved close to Mr. Spragg, whose arm had fallen to
his side.

"See here, I know Undine's reasons. I've had a talk with her--didn't
she tell you? SHE don't beat about the bush the way you do. She told me
straight out what was bothering her. She wants the Marvells to think
she's right out of Kindergarten. 'No goods sent out on approval from
this counter.' And I see her point--_I_ don't mean to publish my
meemo'rs. Only a deal's a deal." He paused a moment, twisting his
fingers about the heavy gold watch-chain that crossed his waistcoat.
"Tell you what, Mr. Spragg, I don't bear malice--not against Undine,
anyway--and if I could have afforded it I'd have been glad enough to
oblige her and forget old times. But you didn't hesitate to kick me when
I was down and it's taken me a day or two to get on my legs again after
that kicking. I see my way now to get there and keep there; and there's
a kinder poetic justice in your being the man to help me up. If I can
get hold of fifty thousand dollars within a day or so I don't care who's
got the start of me. I've got a dead sure thing in sight, and you're the
only man that can get it for me. Now do you see where we're coming out?"

Mr. Spragg, during this discourse, had remained motionless, his hands
in his pockets, his jaws moving mechanically, as though he mumbled a
tooth-pick under his beard. His sallow cheek had turned a shade paler,
and his brows hung threateningly over his half-closed eyes. But there
was no threat--there was scarcely more than a note of dull curiosity--in
the voice with which he said: "You mean to talk?"

Moffatt's rosy face grew as hard as a steel safe. "I mean YOU to
talk--to old Driscoll." He paused, and then added: "It's a hundred
thousand down, between us."

Mr. Spragg once more consulted his watch. "I'll see you again," he said
with an effort.

Moffatt struck one fist against the other. "No, SIR--you won't! You'll
only hear from me--through the Marvell family. Your news ain't worth a
dollar to Driscoll if he don't get it to-day."

He was checked by the sound of steps in the outer office, and Mr.
Spragg's stenographer appeared in the doorway.

"It's Mr. Marvell," she announced; and Ralph Marvell, glowing with haste
and happiness, stood between the two men, holding out his hand to Mr.
Spragg.

"Am I awfully in the way, sir? Turn me out if I am--but first let me
just say a word about this necklace I've ordered for Un--"

He broke off, made aware by Mr. Spragg's glance of the presence of Elmer
Moffatt, who, with unwonted discretion, had dropped back into the
shadow of the door. Marvell turned on Moffatt a bright gaze full of the
instinctive hospitality of youth; but Moffatt looked straight past him
at Mr. Spragg. The latter, as if in response to an imperceptible signal,
mechanically pronounced his visitor's name; and the two young men moved
toward each other.

"I beg your pardon most awfully--am I breaking up an important
conference?" Ralph asked as he shook hands.

"Why, no--I guess we're pretty nearly through. I'll step outside and woo
the blonde while you're talking," Moffatt rejoined in the same key.

"Thanks so much--I shan't take two seconds." Ralph broke off to
scrutinize him. "But haven't we met before? It seems to me I've seen
you--just lately--"

Moffatt seemed about to answer, but his reply was checked by an abrupt
movement on the part of Mr. Spragg. There was a perceptible pause,
during which Moffatt's bright black glance rested questioningly on
Ralph; then he looked again at the older man, and their eyes held each
other for a silent moment.

"Why, no--not as I'm aware of, Mr. Marvell," Moffatt said, addressing
himself amicably to Ralph. "Better late than never, though--and I hope
to have the pleasure soon again."

He divided a nod between the two men, and passed into the outer office,
where they heard him addressing the stenographer in a strain of
exaggerated gallantry.



XI

The July sun enclosed in a ring of fire the ilex grove of a villa in the
hills near Siena.

Below, by the roadside, the long yellow house seemed to waver and
palpitate in the glare; but steep by steep, behind it, the cool
ilex-dusk mounted to the ledge where Ralph Marvell, stretched on his
back in the grass, lay gazing up at a black reticulation of branches
between which bits of sky gleamed with the hardness and brilliancy of
blue enamel.

Up there too the air was thick with heat; but compared with the white
fire below it was a dim and tempered warmth, like that of the churches
in which he and Undine sometimes took refuge at the height of the torrid
days.

Ralph loved the heavy Italian summer, as he had loved the light spring
days leading up to it: the long line of dancing days that had drawn them
on and on ever since they had left their ship at Naples four months
earlier. Four months of beauty, changeful, inexhaustible, weaving itself
about him in shapes of softness and strength; and beside him, hand in
hand with him, embodying that spirit of shifting magic, the radiant
creature through whose eyes he saw it. This was what their hastened
marriage had blessed them with, giving them leisure, before summer came,
to penetrate to remote folds of the southern mountains, to linger in the
shade of Sicilian orange-groves, and finally, travelling by slow stages
to the Adriatic, to reach the central hill-country where even in July
they might hope for a breathable air.

To Ralph the Sienese air was not only breathable but intoxicating. The
sun, treading the earth like a vintager, drew from it heady fragrances,
crushed out of it new colours. All the values of the temperate landscape
were reversed: the noon high-lights were whiter but the shadows had
unimagined colour. On the blackness of cork and ilex and cypress lay the
green and purple lustres, the coppery iridescences, of old bronze; and
night after night the skies were wine-blue and bubbling with stars.
Ralph said to himself that no one who had not seen Italy thus prostrate
beneath the sun knew what secret treasures she could yield.

As he lay there, fragments of past states of emotion, fugitive
felicities of thought and sensation, rose and floated on the surface
of his thoughts. It was one of those moments when the accumulated
impressions of life converge on heart and brain, elucidating, enlacing
each other, in a mysterious confusion of beauty. He had had glimpses of
such a state before, of such mergings of the personal with the general
life that one felt one's self a mere wave on the wild stream of being,
yet thrilled with a sharper sense of individuality than can be known
within the mere bounds of the actual. But now he knew the sensation in
its fulness, and with it came the releasing power of language. Words
were flashing like brilliant birds through the boughs overhead; he had
but to wave his magic wand to have them flutter down to him. Only they
were so beautiful up there, weaving their fantastic flights against the
blue, that it was pleasanter, for the moment, to watch them and let the
wand lie.

He stared up at the pattern they made till his eyes ached with excess of
light; then he changed his position and looked at his wife.

Undine, near by, leaned against a gnarled tree with the slightly
constrained air of a person unused to sylvan abandonments. Her beautiful
back could not adapt itself to the irregularities of the tree-trunk,
and she moved a little now and then in the effort to find an easier
position. But her expression was serene, and Ralph, looking up at her
through drowsy lids, thought her face had never been more exquisite.

"You look as cool as a wave," he said, reaching out for the hand on her
knee. She let him have it, and he drew it closer, scrutinizing it as if
it had been a bit of precious porcelain or ivory. It was small and soft,
a mere featherweight, a puff-ball of a hand--not quick and thrilling,
not a speaking hand, but one to be fondled and dressed in rings, and to
leave a rosy blur in the brain. The fingers were short and tapering,
dimpled at the base, with nails as smooth as rose-leaves. Ralph lifted
them one by one, like a child playing with piano-keys, but they were
inelastic and did not spring back far--only far enough to show the
dimples.

He turned the hand over and traced the course of its blue veins from the
wrist to the rounding of the palm below the fingers; then he put a kiss
in the warm hollow between. The upper world had vanished: his universe
had shrunk to the palm of a hand. But there was no sense of diminution.
In the mystic depths whence his passion sprang, earthly dimensions were
ignored and the curve of beauty was boundless enough to hold whatever
the imagination could pour into it. Ralph had never felt more convinced
of his power to write a great poem; but now it was Undine's hand which
held the magic wand of expression.

She stirred again uneasily, answering his last words with a faint accent
of reproach.

"I don't FEEL cool. You said there'd be a breeze up here.".

He laughed.

"You poor darling! Wasn't it ever as hot as this in Apex?"

She withdrew her hand with a slight grimace.

"Yes--but I didn't marry you to go back to Apex!"

Ralph laughed again; then he lifted himself on his elbow and regained
the hand. "I wonder what you DID marry me for?"

"Mercy! It's too hot for conundrums." She spoke without impatience, but
with a lassitude less joyous than his.

He roused himself. "Do you really mind the heat so much? We'll go, if
you do."

She sat up eagerly. "Go to Switzerland, you mean?"

"Well, I hadn't taken quite as long a leap. I only meant we might drive
back to Siena."

She relapsed listlessly against her tree-trunk. "Oh, Siena's hotter than
this."

"We could go and sit in the cathedral--it's always cool there at
sunset."

"We've sat in the cathedral at sunset every day for a week."

"Well, what do you say to stopping at Lecceto on the way? I haven't
shown you Lecceto yet; and the drive back by moonlight would be
glorious."

This woke her to a slight show of interest. "It might be nice--but where
could we get anything to eat?"

Ralph laughed again. "I don't believe we could. You're too practical."

"Well, somebody's got to be. And the food in the hotel is too disgusting
if we're not on time."

"I admit that the best of it has usually been appropriated by the
extremely good-looking cavalry-officer who's so keen to know you."

Undine's face brightened. "You know he's not a Count; he's a Marquis.
His name's Roviano; his palace in Rome is in the guide-books, and
he speaks English beautifully. Celeste found out about him from the
headwaiter," she said, with the security of one who treats of recognized
values.

Marvell, sitting upright, reached lazily across the grass for his hat.
"Then there's all the more reason for rushing back to defend our share."
He spoke in the bantering tone which had become the habitual expression
of his tenderness; but his eyes softened as they absorbed in a last
glance the glimmering submarine light of the ancient grove, through
which Undine's figure wavered nereid-like above him.

"You never looked your name more than you do now," he said, kneeling
at her side and putting his arm about her. She smiled back a little
vaguely, as if not seizing his allusion, and being content to let it
drop into the store of unexplained references which had once stimulated
her curiosity but now merely gave her leisure to think of other things.
But her smile was no less lovely for its vagueness, and indeed, to
Ralph, the loveliness was enhanced by the latent doubt. He remembered
afterward that at that moment the cup of life seemed to brim over.

"Come, dear--here or there--it's all divine!"

In the carriage, however, she remained insensible to the soft spell of
the evening, noticing only the heat and dust, and saying, as they passed
under the wooded cliff of Lecceto, that they might as well have stopped
there after all, since with such a headache as she felt coming on she
didn't care if she dined or not. Ralph looked up yearningly at the long
walls overhead; but Undine's mood was hardly favourable to communion
with such scenes, and he made no attempt to stop the carriage. Instead
he presently said: "If you're tired of Italy, we've got the world to
choose from."

She did not speak for a moment; then she said: "It's the heat I'm tired
of. Don't people generally come here earlier?"

"Yes. That's why I chose the summer: so that we could have it all to
ourselves."

She tried to put a note of reasonableness into her voice. "If you'd told
me we were going everywhere at the wrong time, of course I could have
arranged about my clothes."

"You poor darling! Let us, by all means, go to the place where the
clothes will be right: they're too beautiful to be left out of our
scheme of life."

Her lips hardened. "I know you don't care how I look. But you didn't
give me time to order anything before we were married, and I've got
nothing but my last winter's things to wear."

Ralph smiled. Even his subjugated mind perceived the inconsistency
of Undine's taxing him with having hastened their marriage; but her
variations on the eternal feminine still enchanted him.

"We'll go wherever you please--you make every place the one place," he
said, as if he were humouring an irresistible child.

"To Switzerland, then? Celeste says St. Moritz is too heavenly,"
exclaimed Undine, who gathered her ideas of Europe chiefly from the
conversation of her experienced attendant.

"One can be cool short of the Engadine. Why not go south again--say to
Capri?"

"Capri? Is that the island we saw from Naples, where the artists go?"
She drew her brows together. "It would be simply awful getting there in
this heat."

"Well, then, I know a little place in Switzerland where one can still
get away from the crowd, and we can sit and look at a green water-fall
while I lie in wait for adjectives."

Mr. Spragg's astonishment on learning that his son-in-law contemplated
maintaining a household on the earnings of his Muse was still matter for
pleasantry between the pair; and one of the humours of their first weeks
together had consisted in picturing themselves as a primeval couple
setting forth across a virgin continent and subsisting on the adjectives
which Ralph was to trap for his epic. On this occasion, however, his
wife did not take up the joke, and he remained silent while their
carriage climbed the long dusty hill to the Fontebranda gate. He had
seen her face droop as he suggested the possibility of an escape from
the crowds in Switzerland, and it came to him, with the sharpness of a
knife-thrust, that a crowd was what she wanted--that she was sick to
death of being alone with him.

He sat motionless, staring ahead at the red-brown walls and towers
on the steep above them. After all there was nothing sudden in his
discovery. For weeks it had hung on the edge of consciousness, but
he had turned from it with the heart's instinctive clinging to the
unrealities by which it lives. Even now a hundred qualifying reasons
rushed to his aid. They told him it was not of himself that Undine had
wearied, but only of their present way of life. He had said a moment
before, without conscious exaggeration, that her presence made any place
the one place; yet how willingly would he have consented to share in
such a life as she was leading before their marriage? And he had to
acknowledge their months of desultory wandering from one remote Italian
hill-top to another must have seemed as purposeless to her as balls and
dinners would have been to him. An imagination like his, peopled with
such varied images and associations, fed by so many currents from the
long stream of human experience, could hardly picture the bareness of
the small half-lit place in which his wife's spirit fluttered. Her mind
was as destitute of beauty and mystery as the prairie school-house in
which she had been educated; and her ideals seemed to Ralph as pathetic
as the ornaments made of corks and cigar-bands with which her infant
hands had been taught to adorn it. He was beginning to understand this,
and learning to adapt himself to the narrow compass of her experience.
The task of opening new windows in her mind was inspiring enough to give
him infinite patience; and he would not yet own to himself that her
pliancy and variety were imitative rather than spontaneous.

Meanwhile he had no desire to sacrifice her wishes to his, and it
distressed him that he dared not confess his real reason for avoiding
the Engadine. The truth was that their funds were shrinking faster than
he had expected. Mr. Spragg, after bluntly opposing their hastened
marriage on the ground that he was not prepared, at such short notice,
to make the necessary provision for his daughter, had shortly afterward
(probably, as Undine observed to Ralph, in consequence of a lucky "turn"
in the Street) met their wishes with all possible liberality, bestowing
on them a wedding in conformity with Mrs. Spragg's ideals and up to the
highest standard of Mrs. Heeny's clippings, and pledging himself to
provide Undine with an income adequate to so brilliant a beginning. It
was understood that Ralph, on their return, should renounce the law for
some more paying business; but this seemed the smallest of sacrifices to
make for the privilege of calling Undine his wife; and besides, he still
secretly hoped that, in the interval, his real vocation might declare
itself in some work which would justify his adopting the life of
letters.

He had assumed that Undine's allowance, with the addition of his own
small income, would be enough to satisfy their needs. His own were few,
and had always been within his means; but his wife's daily requirements,
combined with her intermittent outbreaks of extravagance, had thrown out
all his calculations, and they were already seriously exceeding their
income.

If any one had prophesied before his marriage that he would find it
difficult to tell this to Undine he would have smiled at the suggestion;
and during their first days together it had seemed as though pecuniary
questions were the last likely to be raised between them. But his
marital education had since made strides, and he now knew that a
disregard for money may imply not the willingness to get on without
it but merely a blind confidence that it will somehow be provided. If
Undine, like the lilies of the field, took no care, it was not because
her wants were as few but because she assumed that care would be taken
for her by those whose privilege it was to enable her to unite floral
insouciance with Sheban elegance.

She had met Ralph's first note of warning with the assurance that she
"didn't mean to worry"; and her tone implied that it was his business to
do so for her. He certainly wanted to guard her from this as from all
other cares; he wanted also, and still more passionately after the topic
had once or twice recurred between them, to guard himself from the risk
of judging where he still adored. These restraints to frankness kept him
silent during the remainder of the drive, and when, after dinner, Undine
again complained of her headache, he let her go up to her room and
wandered out into the dimly lit streets to renewed communion with his
problems.

They hung on him insistently as darkness fell, and Siena grew vocal with
that shrill diversity of sounds that breaks, on summer nights, from
every cleft of the masonry in old Italian towns. Then the moon rose,
unfolding depth by depth the lines of the antique land; and Ralph,
leaning against an old brick parapet, and watching each silver-blue
remoteness disclose itself between the dark masses of the middle
distance, felt his spirit enlarged and pacified. For the first time, as
his senses thrilled to the deep touch of beauty, he asked himself if out
of these floating and fugitive vibrations he might not build something
concrete and stable, if even such dull common cares as now oppressed him
might not become the motive power of creation. If he could only, on
the spot, do something with all the accumulated spoils of the last
months--something that should both put money into his pocket and harmony
into the rich confusion of his spirit! "I'll write--I'll write: that
must be what the whole thing means," he said to himself, with a vague
clutch at some solution which should keep him a little longer hanging
half-way down the steep of disenchantment.

He would have stayed on, heedless of time, to trace the ramifications
of his idea in the complex beauty of the scene, but for the longing to
share his mood with Undine. For the last few months every thought and
sensation had been instantly transmuted into such emotional impulses
and, though the currents of communication between himself and Undine
were neither deep nor numerous, each fresh rush of feeling seemed
strong enough to clear a way to her heart. He hurried back, almost
breathlessly, to the inn; but even as he knocked at her door the subtle
emanation of other influences seemed to arrest and chill him.

She had put out the lamp, and sat by the window in the moonlight, her
head propped on a listless hand. As Marvell entered she turned; then,
without speaking, she looked away again.

He was used to this mute reception, and had learned that it had no
personal motive, but was the result of an extremely simplified social
code. Mr. and Mrs. Spragg seldom spoke to each other when they met, and
words of greeting seemed almost unknown to their domestic vocabulary.
Marvell, at first, had fancied that his own warmth would call forth a
response from his wife, who had been so quick to learn the forms of
worldly intercourse; but he soon saw that she regarded intimacy as a
pretext for escaping from such forms into a total absence of expression.

To-night, however, he felt another meaning in her silence, and perceived
that she intended him to feel it. He met it by silence, but of a
different kind; letting his nearness speak for him as he knelt beside
her and laid his cheek against hers. She seemed hardly aware of
the gesture; but to that he was also used. She had never shown any
repugnance to his tenderness, but such response as it evoked was remote
and Ariel-like, suggesting, from the first, not so much of the recoil of
ignorance as the coolness of the element from which she took her name.

As he pressed her to him she seemed to grow less impassive and he felt
her resign herself like a tired child. He held his breath, not daring to
break the spell.

At length he whispered: "I've just seen such a wonderful thing--I wish
you'd been with me!"

"What sort of a thing?" She turned her head with a faint show of
interest.

"A--I don't know--a vision.... It came to me out there just now with the
moonrise."

"A vision?" Her interest flagged. "I never cared much about spirits.
Mother used to try to drag me to seances--but they always made me
sleepy."

Ralph laughed. "I don't mean a dead spirit but a living one! I saw the
vision of a book I mean to do. It came to me suddenly, magnificently,
swooped down on me as that big white moon swooped down on the black
landscape, tore at me like a great white eagle-like the bird of Jove!
After all, imagination WAS the eagle that devoured Prometheus!"

She drew away abruptly, and the bright moonlight showed him the
apprehension in her face. "You're not going to write a book HERE?"

He stood up and wandered away a step or two; then he turned and came
back. "Of course not here. Wherever you want. The main point is that
it's come to me--no, that it's come BACK to me! For it's all these
months together, it's all our happiness--it's the meaning of life that
I've found, and it's you, dearest, you who've given it to me!"

He dropped down beside her again; but she disengaged herself and he
heard a little sob in her throat.

"Undine--what's the matter?"

"Nothing...I don't know...I suppose I'm homesick..."

"Homesick? You poor darling! You're tired of travelling? What is it?"

"I don't know...I don't like Europe...it's not what I expected, and I
think it's all too dreadfully dreary!" The words broke from her in a
long wail of rebellion.

Marvell gazed at her perplexedly. It seemed strange that such unguessed
thoughts should have been stirring in the heart pressed to his. "It's
less interesting than you expected--or less amusing? Is that it?"

"It's dirty and ugly--all the towns we've been to are disgustingly
dirty. I loathe the smells and the beggars. I'm sick and tired of the
stuffy rooms in the hotels. I thought it would all be so splendid--but
New York's ever so much nicer!"

"Not New York in July?"

"I don't care--there are the roof-gardens, anyway; and there are always
people round. All these places seem as if they were dead. It's all like
some awful cemetery."

A sense of compunction checked Marvell's laughter. "Don't cry,
dear--don't! I see, I understand. You're lonely and the heat has tired
you out. It IS dull here; awfully dull; I've been stupid not to feel it.
But we'll start at once--we'll get out of it."

She brightened instantly. "We'll go up to Switzerland?"

"We'll go up to Switzerland." He had a fleeting glimpse

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/11052