Читать книгу Collected Works of Edith Wharton (31 books in one volume) - Edith Wharton - Страница 20

Chelles raised his eyebrows ironically. “When hasn’t one to think of it, in my situation? One hears of nothing else at home—one knows that, like death, it has to come.” His glance, which was still mustering the room, came to a sudden pause and kindled.

“Who’s the lady over there—fair-haired, in white—the one who’s just come in with the redfaced man? They seem to be with a party of your compatriots.”

Bowen followed his glance to a neighbouring table, where, at the moment, Undine Marvell was seating herself at Peter Van Degen’s side, in the company of the Harvey Shallums, the beautiful Mrs. Beringer and a dozen other New York figures.

She was so placed that as she took her seat she recognized Bowen and sent him a smile across the tables. She was more simply dressed than usual, and the pink lights, warming her cheeks and striking gleams from her hair, gave her face a dewy freshness that was new to Bowen. He had always thought her beauty too obvious, too bathed in the bright publicity of the American air; but tonight she seemed to have been brushed by the wing of poetry, and its shadow lingered in her eyes.

Chelles’ gaze made it evident that he had received the same impression.

“One is sometimes inclined to deny your compatriots actual beauty—to charge them with producing the effect without having the features; but in this case—you say you know the lady?”

“Yes: she’s the wife of an old friend.”

“The wife? She’s married? There, again, it’s so puzzling! Your young girls look so experienced, and your married women sometimes so—unmarried.”

“Well, they often are—in these days of divorce!”

The other’s interest quickened. “Your friend’s divorced?”

“Oh, no; heaven forbid! Mrs. Marvell hasn’t been long married; and it was a love-match of the good old kind.”

“Ah—and the husband? Which is he?”

“He’s not here—he’s in New York.”

“Feverishly adding to a fortune already monstrous?”

“No; not precisely monstrous. The Marvells are not well off,” said Bowen, amused by his friend’s interrogations.

“And he allows an exquisite being like that to come to Paris without him—and in company with the redfaced gentleman who seems so alive to his advantages?”

“We don’t ‘allow’ our women this or that; I don’t think we set much store by the compulsory virtues.”

His companion received this with amusement. “If: you’re as detached as that, why does the obsolete institution of marriage survive with you?”

“Oh, it still has its uses. One couldn’t be divorced without it.”

Chelles laughed again; but his straying eye still followed the same direction, and Bowen noticed that the fact was not unremarked by the object of his contemplation. Undine’s party was one of the liveliest in the room: the American laugh rose above the din of the orchestra as the American toilets dominated the less daring effects at the other tables. Undine, on entering, had seemed to be in the same mood as her companions; but Bowen saw that, as she became conscious of his friend’s observation, she isolated herself in a kind of soft abstraction; and he admired the adaptability which enabled her to draw from such surroundings the contrasting graces of reserve.

They had greeted each other with all the outer signs of cordiality, but Bowen fancied she would not care to have him speak to her. She was evidently dining with Van Degen, and Van Degen’s proximity was the last fact she would wish to have transmitted to the critics in Washington Square. Bowen was therefore surprised when, as he rose to leave the restaurant, he heard himself hailed by Peter.

“Hallo—hold on! When did you come over? Mrs. Marvell’s dying for the last news about the old homestead.”

Undine’s smile confirmed the appeal. She wanted to know how lately Bowen had left New York, and pressed him to tell her when he had last seen her boy, how he was looking, and whether Ralph had been persuaded to go down to Clare’s on Saturdays and get a little riding and tennis? And dear Laura—was she well too, and was Paul with her, or still with his grandmother? They were all dreadfully bad correspondents, and so was she. Undine laughingly admitted; and when Ralph had last written her these questions had still been undecided.

As she smiled up at Bowen he saw her glance stray to the spot where his companion hovered; and when the diners rose to move toward the garden for coffee she said, with a sweet note and a detaining smile: “Do come with us—I haven’t half finished.”

Van Degen echoed the request, and Bowen, amused by Undine’s arts, was presently introducing Chelles, and joining with him in the party’s transit to the terrace. The rain had ceased, and under the clear evening sky the restaurant garden opened green depths that skilfully hid its narrow boundaries. Van Degen’s company was large enough to surround two of the tables on the terrace, and Bowen noted the skill with which Undine, leaving him to Mrs. Shallum’s care, contrived to draw Raymond de Chelles to the other table. Still more noticeable was the effect of this stratagem on Van Degen, who also found himself relegated to Mrs. Shallum’s group. Poor Peter’s state was betrayed by the irascibility which wreaked itself on a jostling waiter, and found cause for loud remonstrance in the coldness of the coffee and the badness of the cigars; and Bowen, with something more than the curiosity of the looker-on, wondered whether this were the real clue to Undine’s conduct. He had always smiled at Mrs. Fairford’s fears for Ralph’s domestic peace. He thought Undine too clear-headed to forfeit the advantages of her marriage; but it now struck him that she might have had a glimpse of larger opportunities. Bowen, at the thought, felt the pang of the sociologist over the individual havoc wrought by every social readjustment: it had so long been clear to him that poor Ralph was a survival, and destined, as such, to go down in any conflict with the rising forces.

XX

Some six weeks later. Undine Marvell stood at the window smiling down on her recovered Paris.

Her hotel sitting-room had, as usual, been flowered, cushioned and lampshaded into a delusive semblance of stability; and she had really felt, for the last few weeks, that the life she was leading there must be going to last—it seemed so perfect an answer to all her wants!

As she looked out at the thronged street, on which the summer light lay like a blush of pleasure, she felt herself naturally akin to all the bright and careless freedom of the scene. She had been away from Paris for two days, and the spectacle before her seemed more rich and suggestive after her brief absence from it. Her senses luxuriated in all its material details: the thronging motors, the brilliant shops, the novelty and daring of the women’s dresses, the piled-up colours of the ambulant flower-carts, the appetizing expanse of the fruiterers’ windows, even the chromatic effects of the petits fours behind the plateglass of the pastry-cooks: all the surface-sparkle and variety of the inexhaustible streets of Paris.

The scene before her typified to Undine her first real taste of life. How meagre and starved the past appeared in comparison with this abundant present! The noise, the crowd, the promiscuity beneath her eyes symbolized the glare and movement of her life. Every moment of her days was packed with excitement and exhilaration. Everything amused her: the long hours of bargaining and debate with dressmakers and jewellers, the crowded lunches at fashionable restaurants, the perfunctory dash through a picture-show or the lingering visit to the last new milliner; the afternoon motor-rush to some leafy suburb, where tea and musics and sunset were hastily absorbed on a crowded terrace above the Seine; the whirl home through the Bois to dress for dinner and start again on the round of evening diversions; the dinner at the Nouveau Luxe or the Café de Paris, and the little play at the Capucines or the Variétés, followed, because the night was “too lovely,” and it was a shame to waste it, by a breathless flight back to the Bois, with supper in one of its lamp-hung restaurants, or, if the weather forbade, a tumultuous progress through the midnight haunts where “ladies” were not supposed to show themselves, and might consequently taste the thrill of being occasionally taken for their opposites.

As the varied vision unrolled itself, Undine contrasted it with the pale monotony of her previous summers. The one she most resented was the first after her marriage, the European summer out of whose joys she had been cheated by her own ignorance and Ralph’s perversity. They had been free then, there had been no child to hamper their movements, their money anxieties had hardly begun, the face of life had been fresh and radiant, and she had been doomed to waste such opportunities on a succession of ill-smelling Italian towns. She still felt it to be her deepest grievance against her husband; and now that, after four years of petty household worries, another chance of escape had come, he already wanted to drag her back to bondage!

This fit of retrospection had been provoked by two letters which had come that morning. One was from Ralph, who began by reminding her that he had not heard from her for weeks, and went on to point out, in his usual tone of good-humoured remonstrance, that since her departure the drain on her letter of credit had been deep and constant. “I wanted you,” he wrote, “to get all the fun you could out of the money I made last spring; but I didn’t think you’d get through it quite so fast. Try to come home without leaving too many bills behind you. Your illness and Paul’s cost more than I expected, and Lipscomb has had a bad knock in Wall Street, and hasn’t yet paid his first quarter…”

Always the same monotonous refrain! Was it her fault that she and the boy had been ill? Or that Harry Lipscomb had been “on the wrong side” of Wall Street? Ralph seemed to have money on the brain: his business life had certainly deteriorated him. And, since he hadn’t made a success of it after all, why shouldn’t he turn back to literature and try to write his novel? Undine, the previous winter, had been dazzled by the figures which a well-known magazine editor, whom she had met at dinner had named as within reach of the successful novelist. She perceived for the first time that literature was becoming fashionable, and instantly decided that it would be amusing and original if she and Ralph should owe their prosperity to his talent. She already saw herself, as the wife of a celebrated author, wearing “artistic” dresses and doing the drawingroom over with Gothic tapestries and dim lights in altar candlesticks. But when she suggested Ralph’s taking up his novel he answered with a laugh that his brains were sold to the firm—that when he came back at night the tank was empty…And now he wanted her to sail for home in a week!

The other letter excited a deeper resentment. It was an appeal from Laura Fairford to return and look after Ralph. He was overworked and out of spirits, she wrote, and his mother and sister, reluctant as they were to interfere, felt they ought to urge Undine to come back to him. Details followed, unwelcome and officious. What right had Laura Fairford to preach to her of wifely obligations? No doubt Charles Bowen had sent home a highly-coloured report—and there was really a certain irony in Mrs. Fairford’s criticizing her sister-in-law’s conduct on information obtained from such a source! Undine turned from the window and threw herself down on her deeply cushioned sofa. She was feeling the pleasant fatigue consequent on her trip to the country, whither she and Mrs. Shallum had gone with Raymond de Chelles to spend a night at the old Marquis’s chateau. When her travelling companions, an hour earlier, had left her at her door, she had half-promised to rejoin them for a late dinner in the Bois; and as she leaned back among the cushions disturbing thoughts were banished by the urgent necessity of deciding what dress she should wear.

These bright weeks of the Parisian spring had given her a first real glimpse into the art of living. From the experts who had taught her to subdue the curves of her figure and soften her bright free stare with dusky pencillings, to the skilled purveyors of countless forms of pleasure—the theatres and restaurants, the green and blossoming suburbs, the whole shining shifting spectacle of nights and days—every sight and sound and word had combined to charm her perceptions and refine her taste. And her growing friendship with Raymond de Chelles had been the most potent of these influences.

Chelles, at once immensely “taken,” had not only shown his eagerness to share in the helter-skelter motions of Undine’s party, but had given her glimpses of another, still more brilliant existence, that life of the inaccessible “Faubourg” of which the first tantalizing hints had but lately reached her. Hitherto she had assumed that Paris existed for the stranger, that its native life was merely an obscure foundation for the dazzling superstructure of hotels and restaurants in which her compatriots disported themselves. But lately she had begun to hear about other American women, the women who had married into the French aristocracy, and who led, in the high-walled houses beyond the Seine which she had once thought so dull and dingy, a life that made her own seem as undistinguished as the social existence of the Mealey House. Perhaps what most exasperated her was the discovery, in this impenetrable group, of the Miss Wincher who had poisoned her far-off summer at Potash Springs. To recognize her old enemy in the Marquise de Trezac who so frequently figured in the Parisian chronicle was the more irritating to Undine because her intervening social experiences had caused her to look back on Nettie Wincher as a frumpy girl who wouldn’t have “had a show” in New York.

Once more all the accepted values were reversed, and it turned out that Miss Wincher had been in possession of some key to success on which Undine had not yet put her hand. To know that others were indifferent to what she had thought important was to cheapen all present pleasure and turn the whole force of her desires in a new direction. What she wanted for the moment was to linger on in Paris, prolonging her flirtation with Chelles, and profiting by it to detach herself from her compatriots and enter doors closed to their approach. And Chelles himself attracted her: she thought him as “sweet” as she had once thought Ralph, whose fastidiousness and refinement were blent in him with a delightful foreign vivacity. His chief value, however, lay in his power of exciting Van Degen’s jealousy. She knew enough of French customs to be aware that such devotion as Chelles’ was not likely to have much practical bearing on her future; but Peter had an alarming way of lapsing into security, and as a spur to his ardour she knew the value of other men’s attentions.

It had become Undine’s fixed purpose to bring Van Degen to a definite expression of his intentions. The case of Indiana Frusk, whose brilliant marriage the journals of two continents had recently chronicled with unprecedented richness of detail, had made less impression on him than she hoped. He treated it as a comic episode without special bearing on their case, and once, when Undine cited Rolliver’s expensive fight for freedom as an instance of the power of love over the most invulnerable natures, had answered carelessly: “Oh, his first wife was a laundress, I believe.”

But all about them couples were unpairing and pairing again with an ease and rapidity that encouraged Undine to bide her time. It was simply a question of making Van Degen want her enough, and of not being obliged to abandon the game before he wanted her as much as she meant he should. This was precisely what would happen if she were compelled to leave Paris now. Already the event had shown how right she had been to come abroad: the attention she attracted in Paris had reawakened Van Degen’s fancy, and her hold over him was stronger than when they had parted in America. But the next step must be taken with coolness and circumspection; and she must not throw away what she had gained by going away at a stage when he was surer of her than she of him. She was still intensely considering these questions when the door behind her opened and he came in.

She looked up with a frown and he gave a deprecating laugh. “Didn’t I knock? Don’t look so savage! They told me downstairs you’d got back, and I just bolted in without thinking.”

He had widened and purpled since their first encounter, five years earlier, but his features had not matured. His face was still the face of a covetous bullying boy, with a large appetite for primitive satisfactions and a sturdy belief in his intrinsic right to them. It was all the more satisfying to Undine’s vanity to see his look change at her tone from command to conciliation, and from conciliation to the entreaty of a capriciously-treated animal.

“What a ridiculous hour for a visit!” she exclaimed, ignoring his excuse. “Well, if you disappear like that, without a word—”

“I told my maid to telephone you I was going away.”

“You couldn’t make time to do it yourself, I suppose?”

“We rushed off suddenly; I’d hardly time to get to the station.”

“You rushed off where, may I ask?” Van Degen still lowered down on her.

“Oh didn’t I tell you? I’ve been down staying at Chelles’ chateau in Burgundy.” Her face lit up and she raised herself eagerly on her elbow.

“It’s the most wonderful old house you ever saw: a real castle, with towers, and water all round it, and a funny kind of bridge they pull up. Chelles said he wanted me to see just how they lived at home, and I did; I saw everything: the tapestries that Louis Quinze gave them, and the family portraits, and the chapel, where their own priest says mass, and they sit by themselves in a balcony with crowns all over it. The priest was a lovely old man—he said he’d give anything to convert me. Do you know, I think there’s something very beautiful about the Roman Catholic religion? I’ve often felt I might have been happier if I’d had some religious influence in my life.”

She sighed a little, and turned her head away. She flattered herself that she had learned to strike the right note with Van Degen. At this crucial stage he needed a taste of his own methods, a glimpse of the fact that there were women in the world who could get on without him.

He continued to gaze down at her sulkily. “Were the old people there? You never told me you knew his mother.”

“I don’t. They weren’t there. But it didn’t make a bit of difference, because Raymond sent down a cook from the Luxe.”

“Oh, Lord,” Van Degen groaned, dropping down on the end of the sofa. “Was the cook got down to chaperon you?”

Undine laughed. “You talk like Ralph! I had Bertha with me.”

“BERTHA!” His tone of contempt surprised her. She had supposed that Mrs. Shallum’s presence had made the visit perfectly correct.

“You went without knowing his parents, and without their inviting you? Don’t you know what that sort of thing means out here? Chelles did it to brag about you at his club. He wants to compromise you—that’s his game!”

“Do you suppose he does?” A flicker of a smile crossed her lips. “I’m so unconventional: when I like a man I never stop to think about such things. But I ought to, of course—you’re quite right.” She looked at Van Degen thoughtfully. “At any rate, he’s not a married man.”

Van Degen had got to his feet again and was standing accusingly before her; but as she spoke the blood rose to his neck and ears. “What difference does that make?”

“It might make a good deal. I see,” she added, “how careful I ought to be about going round with you.”

“With ME?” His face fell at the retort; then he broke into a laugh. He adored Undine’s “smartness,” which was of precisely the same quality as his own. “Oh, that’s another thing: you can always trust me to look after you!”

“With your reputation? Much obliged!”

Van Degen smiled. She knew he liked such allusions, and was pleased that she thought him compromising.

“Oh, I’m as good as gold. You’ve made a new man of me!”

“Have I?” She considered him in silence for a moment. “I wonder what you’ve done to me but make a discontented woman of me—discontented with everything I had before I knew you?”

The change of tone was thrilling to him. He forgot her mockery, forgot his rival, and sat down at her side, almost in possession of her waist. “Look here,” he asked, “where are we going to dine tonight?”

His nearness was not agreeable to Undine, but she liked his free way, his contempt for verbal preliminaries. Ralph’s reserves and delicacies, his perpetual desire that he and she should be attuned to the same key, had always vaguely bored her; whereas in Van Degen’s manner she felt a hint of the masterful way that had once subdued her in Elmer Moffatt. But she drew back, releasing herself.

“Tonight? I can’t—I’m engaged.”

“I know you are: engaged to ME! You promised last Sunday you’d dine with me out of town tonight.”

“How can I remember what I promised last Sunday? Besides, after what you’ve said, I see I oughtn’t to.”

“What do you mean by what I’ve said?”

“Why, that I’m imprudent; that people are talking—”

He stood up with an angry laugh. “I suppose you’re dining with Chelles. Is that it?”

“Is that the way you cross-examine Clare?”

“I don’t care a hang what Clare does—I never have.”

“That must—in some ways—be rather convenient for her!”

“Glad you think so. ARE you dining with him?”

She slowly turned the wedding-ring upon her finger. “You know I’m NOT married to you—yet!”

He took a random turn through the room; then he came back and planted himself wrathfully before her. “Can’t you see the man’s doing his best to make a fool of you?”

She kept her amused gaze on him. “Does it strike you that it’s such an awfully easy thing to do?”

The edges of his ears were purple. “I sometimes think it’s easier for these damned little dancing-masters than for one of us.”

Undine was still smiling up at him; but suddenly her grew grave. “What does it matter what I do or don’t do, when Ralph has ordered me home next week?”

“Ordered you home?” His face changed. “Well, you’re not going, are you?”

“What’s the use of saying such things?” She gave a disenchanted laugh. “I’m a poor man’s wife, and can’t do the things my friends do. It’s not because Ralph loves me that he wants me back—it’s simply because he can’t afford to let me stay!”

Van Degen’s perturbation was increasing. “But you mustn’t go—it’s preposterous! Why should a woman like you be sacrificed when a lot of dreary frumps have everything they want? Besides, you can’t chuck me like this! Why, we’re all to motor down to Aix next week, and perhaps take a dip into Italy—”

“OH, ITALY—” she murmured on a note of yearning.

He was closer now, and had her hands. “You’d love that, wouldn’t you? As far as Venice, anyhow; and then in August there’s Trouville—you’ve never tried Trouville? There’s an awfully jolly crowd there—and the motoring’s ripping in Normandy. If you say so I’ll take a villa there instead of going back to Newport. And I’ll put the Sorceress in commission, and you can make up parties and run off whenever you like, to Scotland or Norway—” He hung above her. “Don’t dine with Chelles tonight! Come with me, and we’ll talk things over; and next week we’ll run down to Trouville to choose the villa.”

Undine’s heart was beating fast, but she felt within her a strange lucid force of resistance. Because of that sense of security she left her hands in Van Degen’s. So Mr. Spragg might have felt at the tensest hour of the Pure Water move. She leaned forward, holding her suitor off by the pressure of her bent-back palms.

“Kiss me goodbye, Peter; I sail on Wednesday,” she said.

It was the first time she had permitted him a kiss, and as his face darkened down on her she felt a moment’s recoil. But her physical reactions were never very acute: she always vaguely wondered why people made “such a fuss,” were so violently for or against such demonstrations. A cool spirit within her seemed to watch over and regulate her sensations, and leave her capable of measuring the intensity of those she provoked.

She turned to look at the clock. “You must go now—I shall be hours late for dinner.”

“Go—after that?” He held her fast. “Kiss me again,” he commanded.

It was wonderful how cool she felt—how easily she could slip out of his grasp! Any man could be managed like a child if he were really in love with one….

“Don’t be a goose, Peter; do you suppose I’d have kissed you if—”

“If what—what—what?” he mimicked her ecstatically, not listening.

She saw that if she wished to make him hear her she must put more distance between them, and she rose and moved across the room. From the fireplace she turned to add—“if we hadn’t been saying goodbye?”

“Goodbye—now? What’s the use of talking like that?” He jumped up and followed her. “Look here, Undine—I’ll do anything on earth you want; only don’t talk of going! If you’ll only stay I’ll make it all as straight and square as you please. I’ll get Bertha Shallum to stop over with you for the summer; I’ll take a house at Trouville and make my wife come out there. Hang it, she SHALL, if you say so! Only be a little good to me!”

Still she stood before him without speaking, aware that her implacable brows and narrowed lips would hold him off as long as she chose.

“What’s the matter. Undine? Why don’t you answer? You know you can’t go back to that deadly dry-rot!”

She swept about on him with indignant eyes. “I can’t go on with my present life either. It’s hateful—as hateful as the other. If I don’t go home I’ve got to decide on something different.”

“What do you mean by ‘something different’?” She was silent, and he insisted: “Are you really thinking of marrying Chelles?”

She started as if he had surprised a secret. “I’ll never forgive you if you speak of it—”

“Good Lord! Good Lord!” he groaned.

She remained motionless, with lowered lids, and he went up to her and pulled her about so that she faced him. “Undine, honour bright—do you think he’ll marry you?”

She looked at him with a sudden hardness in her eyes. “I really can’t discuss such things with you.”

“Oh, for the Lord’s sake don’t take that tone! I don’t half know what I’m saying…but you mustn’t throw yourself away a second time. I’ll do anything you want—I swear I will!”

A knock on the door sent them apart, and a servant entered with a telegram.

Undine turned away to the window with the narrow blue slip. She was glad of the interruption: the sense of what she had at stake made her want to pause a moment and to draw breath.

The message was a long cable signed with Laura Fairford’s name. It told her that Ralph had been taken suddenly ill with pneumonia, that his condition was serious and that the doctors advised his wife’s immediate return.

Undine had to read the words over two or three times to get them into her crowded mind; and even after she had done so she needed more time to see their bearing on her own situation. If the message had concerned her boy her brain would have acted more quickly. She had never troubled herself over the possibility of Paul’s falling ill in her absence, but she understood now that if the cable had been about him she would have rushed to the earliest steamer. With Ralph it was different. Ralph was always perfectly well—she could not picture him as being suddenly at death’s door and in need of her. Probably his mother and sister had had a panic: they were always full of sentimental terrors. The next moment an angry suspicion flashed across her: what if the cable were a device of the Marvell women to bring her back? Perhaps it had been sent with Ralph’s connivance! No doubt Bowen had written home about her—Washington Square had received some monstrous report of her doings!… Yes, the cable was clearly an echo of Laura’s letter—mother and daughter had cooked it up to spoil her pleasure. Once the thought had occurred to her it struck root in her mind and began to throw out giant branches. Van Degen followed her to the window, his face still flushed and working. “What’s the matter?” he asked, as she continued to stare silently at the telegram.

She crumpled the strip of paper in her hand. If only she had been alone, had had a chance to think out her answers!

“What on earth’s the matter?” he repeated.

“Oh, nothing—nothing.”

“Nothing? When you’re as white as a sheet?”

“Am I?” She gave a slight laugh. “It’s only a cable from home.”

“Ralph?”

She hesitated. “No. Laura.”

“What the devil is SHE cabling you about?”

“She says Ralph wants me.”

“Now—at once?”

“At once.”

Van Degen laughed impatiently. “Why don’t he tell you so himself? What business is it of Laura Fairford’s?”

Undine’s gesture implied a “What indeed?”

“Is that all she says?”

She hesitated again. “Yes—that’s all.” As she spoke she tossed the telegram into the basket beneath the writing-table. “As if I didn’t HAVE to go anyhow?” she exclaimed.

With an aching clearness of vision she saw what lay before her—the hurried preparations, the long tedious voyage on a steamer chosen at haphazard, the arrival in the deadly July heat, and the relapse into all the insufferable daily fag of nursery and kitchen—she saw it and her imagination recoiled.

Van Degen’s eyes still hung on her: she guessed that he was intensely engaged in trying to follow what was passing through her mind. Presently he came up to her again, no longer perilous and importunate, but awkwardly tender, ridiculously moved by her distress.

“Undine, listen: won’t you let me make it all right for you to stay?”

Her heart began to beat more quickly, and she let him come close, meeting his eyes coldly but without anger.

“What do you call ‘making it all right’? Paying my bills? Don’t you see that’s what I hate, and will never let myself be dragged into again?” She laid her hand on his arm. “The time has come when I must be sensible, Peter; that’s why we must say goodbye.”

“Do you mean to tell me you’re going back to Ralph?”

She paused a moment; then she murmured between her lips: “I shall never go back to him.”

“Then you DO mean to marry Chelles?”

“I’ve told you we must say goodbye. I’ve got to look out for my future.”

He stood before her, irresolute, tormented, his lazy mind and impatient senses labouring with a problem beyond their power. “Ain’t I here to look out for your future?” he said at last.

“No one shall look out for it in the way you mean. I’d rather never see you again—”

He gave her a baffled stare. “Oh, damn it—if that’s the way you feel!” He turned and flung away toward the door.

She stood motionless where he left her, every nerve strung to the highest pitch of watchfulness. As she stood there, the scene about her stamped itself on her brain with the sharpest precision. She was aware of the fading of the summer light outside, of the movements of her maid, who was laying out her dinner-dress in the room beyond, and of the fact that the tea-roses on her writing-table, shaken by Van Degen’s tread, were dropping their petals over Ralph’s letter, and down on the crumpled telegram which she could see through the trellised sides of the scrap-basket.

In another moment Van Degen would be gone. Worse yet, while he wavered in the doorway the Shallums and Chelles, after vainly awaiting her, might dash back from the Bois and break in on them. These and other chances rose before her, urging her to action; but she held fast, immovable, unwavering, a proud yet plaintive image of renunciation.

Van Degen’s hand was on the door. He half-opened it and then turned back.

“That’s all you’ve got to say, then?”

“That’s all.”

He jerked the door open and passed out. She saw him stop in the anteroom to pick up his hat and stick, his heavy figure silhouetted against the glare of the wall-lights. A ray of the same light fell on her where she stood in the unlit sitting-room, and her reflection bloomed out like a flower from the mirror that faced her. She looked at the image and waited. Van Degen put his hat on his head and slowly opened the door into the outer hall. Then he turned abruptly, his bulk eclipsing her reflection as he plunged back into the room and came up to her.

“I’ll do anything you say. Undine; I’ll do anything in God’s world to keep you!”

She turned her eyes from the mirror and let them rest on his face, which looked as small and withered as an old man’s, with a lower lip that trembled queerly….

XXI

The spring in New York proceeded through more than its usual extremes of temperature to the threshold of a sultry June.

Ralph Marvell, wearily bent to his task, felt the fantastic humours of the weather as only one more incoherence in the general chaos of his case. It was strange enough, after four years of marriage, to find himself again in his old brown room in Washington Square. It was hardly there that he had expected Pegasus to land him; and, like a man returning to the scenes of his childhood, he found everything on a much smaller scale than he had imagined. Had the Dagonet boundaries really narrowed, or had the breach in the walls of his own life let in a wider vision?

Certainly there had come to be other differences between his present and his former self than that embodied in the presence of his little boy in the next room. Paul, in fact, was now the chief link between Ralph and his past. Concerning his son he still felt and thought, in a general way, in the terms of the Dagonet tradition; he still wanted to implant in Paul some of the reserves and discriminations which divided that tradition from the new spirit of limitless concession. But for himself it was different. Since his transaction with Moffatt he had had the sense of living under a new dispensation. He was not sure that it was any worse than the other; but then he was no longer very sure about anything. Perhaps this growing indifference was merely the reaction from a long nervous strain: that his mother and sister thought it so was shown by the way in which they mutely watched and hovered. Their discretion was like the hushed tread about a sick-bed. They permitted themselves no criticism of Undine; he was asked no awkward questions, subjected to no ill-timed sympathy. They simply took him back, on his own terms, into the life he had left them to; and their silence had none of those subtle implications of disapproval which may be so much more wounding than speech.

For a while he received a weekly letter from Undine. Vague and disappointing though they were, these missives helped him through the days; but he looked forward to them rather as a pretext for replies than for their actual contents. Undine was never at a loss for the spoken word: Ralph had often wondered at her verbal range and her fluent use of terms outside the current vocabulary. She had certainly not picked these up in books, since she never opened one: they seemed rather like some odd transmission of her preaching grandparent’s oratory. But in her brief and colourless letters she repeated the same bald statements in the same few terms. She was well, she had been “round” with Bertha Shallum, she had dined with the Jim Driscolls or May Beringer or Dicky Bowles, the weather was too lovely or too awful; such was the gist of her news. On the last page she hoped Paul was well and sent him a kiss; but she never made a suggestion concerning his care or asked a question about his pursuits. One could only infer that, knowing in what good hands he was, she judged such solicitude superfluous; and it was thus that Ralph put the matter to his mother.

“Of course she’s not worrying about the boy—why should she? She knows that with you and Laura he’s as happy as a king.”

To which Mrs. Marvell would answer gravely: “When you write, be sure to say I shan’t put on his thinner flannels as long as this east wind lasts.”

As for her husband’s welfare. Undine’s sole allusion to it consisted in the invariable expression of the hope that he was getting along all right: the phrase was always the same, and Ralph learned to know just how far down the third page to look for it. In a postscript she sometimes asked him to tell her mother about a new way of doing hair or cutting a skirt; and this was usually the most eloquent passage of the letter. What satisfaction he extracted from these communications he would have found it hard to say; yet when they did not come he missed them hardly less than if they had given him all he craved. Sometimes the mere act of holding the blue or mauve sheet and breathing its scent was like holding his wife’s hand and being enveloped in her fresh young fragrance: the sentimental disappointment vanished in the penetrating physical sensation. In other moods it was enough to trace the letters of the first line and the last for the desert of perfunctory phrases between the two to vanish, leaving him only the vision of their interlaced names, as of a mystic bond which her own hand had tied. Or else he saw her, closely, palpably before him, as she sat at her writing-table, frowning and a little flushed, her bent nape showing the light on her hair, her short lip pulled up by the effort of composition; and this picture had the violent reality of dream-images on the verge of waking. At other times, as he read her letter, he felt simply that at least in the moment of writing it she had been with him. But in one of the last she had said (to excuse a bad blot and an incoherent sentence): “Everybody’s talking to me at once, and I don’t know what I’m writing.” That letter he had thrown into the fire….

After the first few weeks, the letters came less and less regularly: at the end of two months they ceased. Ralph had got into the habit of watching for them on the days when a foreign post was due, and as the weeks went by without a sign he began to invent excuses for leaving the office earlier and hurrying back to Washington Square to search the letter-box for a big tinted envelope with a straggling blotted superscription.

Undine’s departure had given him a momentary sense of liberation: at that stage in their relations any change would have brought relief. But now that she was gone he knew she could never really go. Though his feeling for her had changed, it still ruled his life. If he saw her in her weakness he felt her in her power: the power of youth and physical radiance that clung to his disenchanted memories as the scent she used clung to her letters. Looking back at their four years of marriage he began to ask himself if he had done all he could to draw her half-formed spirit from its sleep. Had he not expected too much at first, and grown too indifferent in the sequel? After all, she was still in the toy age; and perhaps the very extravagance of his love had retarded her growth, helped to imprison her in a little circle of frivolous illusions. But the last months had made a man of him, and when she came back he would know how to lift her to the height of his experience.

So he would reason, day by day, as he hastened back to Washington Square; but when he opened the door, and his first glance at the hall table showed him there was no letter there, his illusions shrivelled down to their weak roots. She had not written: she did not mean to write. He and the boy were no longer a part of her life. When she came back everything would be as it had been before, with the dreary difference that she had tasted new pleasures and that their absence would take the savour from all he had to give her. Then the coming of another foreign mail would lift his hopes, and as he hurried home he would imagine new reasons for expecting a letter….

Week after week he swung between the extremes of hope and dejection, and at last, when the strain had become unbearable, he cabled her. The answer ran: “Very well best love writing”; but the promised letter never came….

He went on steadily with his work: he even passed through a phase of exaggerated energy. But his baffled youth fought in him for air. Was this to be the end? Was he to wear his life out in useless drudgery? The plain prose of it, of course, was that the economic situation remained unchanged by the sentimental catastrophe and that he must go on working for his wife and child. But at any rate, as it was mainly for Paul that he would henceforth work, it should be on his own terms and according to his inherited notions of “straightness.” He would never again engage in any transaction resembling his compact with Moffatt. Even now he was not sure there had been anything crooked in that; but the fact of his having instinctively referred the point to Mr. Spragg rather than to his grandfather implied a presumption against it.

His partners were quick to profit by his sudden spurt of energy, and his work grew no lighter. He was not only the youngest and most recent member of the firm, but the one who had so far added least to the volume of its business. His hours were the longest, his absences, as summer approached, the least frequent and the most grudgingly accorded. No doubt his associates knew that he was pressed for money and could not risk a break. They “worked” him, and he was aware of it, and submitted because he dared not lose his job. But the long hours of mechanical drudgery were telling on his active body and undisciplined nerves. He had begun too late to subject himself to the persistent mortification of spirit and flesh which is a condition of the average business life; and after the long dull days in the office the evenings at his grandfather’s whist-table did not give him the counter-stimulus he needed.

Almost every one had gone out of town; but now and then Miss Ray came to dine, and Ralph, seated beneath the family portraits and opposite the desiccated Harriet, who had already faded to the semblance of one of her own great-aunts, listened languidly to the kind of talk that the originals might have exchanged about the same table when New York gentility centred in the Battery and the Bowling Green. Mr. Dagonet was always pleasant to see and hear, but his sarcasms were growing faint and recondite: they had as little bearing on life as the humours of a Restoration comedy. As for Mrs. Marvell and Miss Ray, they seemed to the young man even more spectrally remote: hardly anything that mattered to him existed for them, and their prejudices reminded him of sign-posts warning off trespassers who have long since ceased to intrude.

Now and then he dined at his club and went on to the theatre with some young men of his own age; but he left them afterward, half vexed with himself for not being in the humour to prolong the adventure. There were moments when he would have liked to affirm his freedom in however commonplace a way: moments when the vulgarest way would have seemed the most satisfying. But he always ended by walking home alone and tiptoeing upstairs through the sleeping house lest he should wake his boy….

On Saturday afternoons, when the business world was hurrying to the country for golf and tennis, he stayed in town and took Paul to see the Spraggs. Several times since his wife’s departure he had tried to bring about closer relations between his own family and Undine’s; and the ladies of Washington Square, in their eagerness to meet his wishes, had made various friendly advances to Mrs. Spragg. But they were met by a mute resistance which made Ralph suspect that Undine’s strictures on his family had taken root in her mother’s brooding mind; and he gave up the struggle to bring together what had been so effectually put asunder.

If he regretted his lack of success it was chiefly because he was so sorry for the Spraggs. Soon after Undine’s marriage they had abandoned their polychrome suite at the Stentorian, and since then their peregrinations had carried them through half the hotels of the metropolis. Undine, who had early discovered her mistake in thinking hotel life fashionable, had tried to persuade her parents to take a house of their own; but though they refrained from taxing her with inconsistency they did not act on her suggestion. Mrs. Spragg seemed to shrink from the thought of “going back to housekeeping,” and Ralph suspected that she depended on the transit from hotel to hotel as the one element of variety in her life. As for Mr. Spragg, it was impossible to imagine any one in whom the domestic sentiments were more completely unlocalized and disconnected from any fixed habits; and he was probably aware of his changes of abode chiefly as they obliged him to ascend from the Subway, or descend from the “Elevated,” a few blocks higher up or lower down.

Neither husband nor wife complained to Ralph of their frequent displacements, or assigned to them any cause save the vague one of “guessing they could do better”; but Ralph noticed that the decreasing luxury of their life synchronized with Undine’s growing demands for money. During the last few months they had transferred themselves to the “Malibran,” a tall narrow structure resembling a grain-elevator divided into cells, where linoleum and lincrusta simulated the stucco and marble of the Stentorian, and fagged business men and their families consumed the watery stews dispensed by “coloured help” in the grey twilight of a basement diningroom.

Mrs. Spragg had no sitting-room, and Paul and his father had to be received in one of the long public parlours, between ladies seated at rickety desks in the throes of correspondence and groups of listlessly conversing residents and callers.

The Spraggs were intensely proud of their grandson, and Ralph perceived that they would have liked to see Paul charging uproariously from group to group, and thrusting his bright curls and cherubic smile upon the general attention. The fact that the boy preferred to stand between his grandfather’s knees and play with Mr. Spragg’s Masonic emblem, or dangle his legs from the arm of Mrs. Spragg’s chair, seemed to his grandparents evidence of ill-health or undue repression, and he was subjected by Mrs. Spragg to searching enquiries as to how his food set, and whether he didn’t think his Popper was too strict with him. A more embarrassing problem was raised by the “surprise” (in the shape of peanut candy or chocolate creams) which he was invited to hunt for in Gran’ma’s pockets, and which Ralph had to confiscate on the way home lest the dietary rules of Washington Square should be too visibly infringed.

Sometimes Ralph found Mrs. Heeny, ruddy and jovial, seated in the armchair opposite Mrs. Spragg, and regaling her with selections from a new batch of clippings. During Undine’s illness of the previous winter Mrs. Heeny had become a familiar figure to Paul, who had learned to expect almost as much from her bag as from his grandmother’s pockets; so that the intemperate Saturdays at the Malibran were usually followed by languid and abstemious Sundays in Washington Square. Mrs. Heeny, being unaware of this sequel to her bounties, formed the habit of appearing regularly on Saturdays, and while she chatted with his grandmother the little boy was encouraged to scatter the grimy carpet with face-creams and bunches of clippings in his thrilling quest for the sweets at the bottom of her bag.

“I declare, if he ain’t in just as much of a hurry f’r everything as his mother!” she exclaimed one day in her rich rolling voice; and stooping to pick up a long strip of newspaper which Paul had flung aside she added, as she smoothed it out: “I guess ‘f he was a little mite older he’d be better pleased with this ‘n with the candy. It’s the very thing I was trying to find for you the other day, Mrs. Spragg,” she went on, holding the bit of paper at arm’s length; and she began to read out, with a loudness proportioned to the distance between her eyes and the text:

“With two such sprinters as ‘Pete’ Van Degen and Dicky Bowles to set the pace, it’s no wonder the New York set in Paris has struck a livelier gait than ever this spring. It’s a high-pressure season and no mistake, and no one lags behind less than the fascinating Mrs. Ralph Marvell, who is to be seen daily and nightly in all the smartest restaurants and naughtiest theatres, with so many devoted swains in attendance that the rival beauties of both worlds are said to be making catty comments. But then Mrs. Marvell’s gowns are almost as good as her looks—and how can you expect the other women to stand for such a monopoly?”

To escape the strain of these visits, Ralph once or twice tried the experiment of leaving Paul with his grandparents and calling for him in the late afternoon; but one day, on reentering the Malibran, he was met by a small abashed figure clad in a kaleidoscopic tartan and a green velvet cap with a silver thistle. After this experience of the “surprises” of which Gran’ma was capable when she had a chance to take Paul shopping Ralph did not again venture to leave his son, and their subsequent Saturdays were passed together in the sultry gloom of the Malibran. Conversation with the Spraggs was almost impossible. Ralph could talk with his father-in-law in his office, but in the hotel parlour Mr. Spragg sat in a ruminating silence broken only by the emission of an occasional “Well—well” addressed to his grandson. As for Mrs. Spragg, her son-in-law could not remember having had a sustained conversation with her since the distant day when he had first called at the Stentorian, and had been “entertained,” in Undine’s absence, by her astonished mother. The shock of that encounter had moved Mrs. Spragg to eloquence; but Ralph’s entrance into the family, without making him seem less of a stranger, appeared once for all to have relieved her of the obligation of finding something to say to him.

The one question she invariably asked: “You heard from Undie?” had been relatively easy to answer while his wife’s infrequent letters continued to arrive; but a Saturday came when he felt the blood rise to his temples as, for the fourth consecutive week, he stammered out, under the snapping eyes of Mrs. Heeny: “No, not by this post either—I begin to think I must have lost a letter”; and it was then that Mr. Spragg, who had sat silently looking up at the ceiling, cut short his wife’s exclamation by an enquiry about real estate in the Bronx. After that, Ralph noticed, Mrs. Spragg never again renewed her question; and he understood that his father-in-law had guessed his embarrassment and wished to spare it.

Ralph had never thought of looking for any delicacy of feeling under Mr. Spragg’s large lazy irony, and the incident drew the two men nearer together. Mrs. Spragg, for her part, was certainly not delicate; but she was simple and without malice, and Ralph liked her for her silent acceptance of her diminished state. Sometimes, as he sat between the lonely primitive old couple, he wondered from what source Undine’s voracious ambitions had been drawn: all she cared for, and attached importance to, was as remote from her parents’ conception of life as her impatient greed from their passive stoicism.

One hot afternoon toward the end of June Ralph suddenly wondered if Clare Van Degen were still in town. She had dined in Washington Square some ten days earlier, and he remembered her saying that she had sent the children down to Long Island, but that she herself meant to stay on in town till the heat grew unbearable. She hated her big showy place on Long Island, she was tired of the spring trip to London and Paris, where one met at every turn the faces one had grown sick of seeing all winter, and she declared that in the early summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers… She put the case amusingly, and it was like her to take up any attitude that went against the habits of her set; but she lived at the mercy of her moods, and one could never tell how long any one of them would rule her.

As he sat in his office, with the noise and glare of the endless afternoon rising up in hot waves from the street, there wandered into Ralph’s mind a vision of her shady drawingroom. All day it hung before him like the mirage of a spring before a dusty traveller: he felt a positive thirst for her presence, for the sound of her voice, the wide spaces and luxurious silences surrounding her.

It was perhaps because, on that particular day, a spiral pain was twisting around in the back of his head, and digging in a little deeper with each twist, and because the figures on the balance sheet before him were hopping about like black imps in an infernal forward-and-back, that the picture hung there so persistently. It was a long time since he had wanted anything as much as, at that particular moment, he wanted to be with Clare and hear her voice; and as soon as he had ground out the day’s measure of work he rang up the Van Degen palace and learned that she was still in town.

The lowered awnings of her inner drawingroom cast a luminous shadow on old cabinets and consoles, and on the pale flowers scattered here and there in vases of bronze and porcelain. Clare’s taste was as capricious as her moods, and the rest of the house was not in harmony with this room. There was, in particular, another drawingroom, which she now described as Peter’s creation, but which Ralph knew to be partly hers: a heavily decorated apartment, where Popple’s portrait of her throned over a waste of gilt furniture. It was characteristic that to-day she had had Ralph shown in by another way; and that, as she had spared him the polyphonic drawingroom, so she had skilfully adapted her own appearance to her soberer background. She sat near the window, reading, in a clear cool dress: and at his entrance she merely slipped a finger between the pages and looked up at him.

Her way of receiving him made him feel that restlessness and stridency were as unlike her genuine self as the gilded drawingroom, and that this quiet creature was the only real Clare, the Clare who had once been so nearly his, and who seemed to want him to know that she had never wholly been any one else’s.

“Why didn’t you let me know you were still in town?” he asked, as he sat down in the sofa-corner near her chair.

Her dark smile deepened. “I hoped you’d come and see.”

“One never knows, with you.”

He was looking about the room with a kind of confused pleasure in its pale shadows and spots of dark rich colour. The old lacquer screen behind Clare’s head looked like a lustreless black pool with gold leaves floating on it; and another piece, a little table at her elbow, had the brown bloom and the pear-like curves of an old violin.

“I like to be here,” Ralph said.

She did not make the mistake of asking: “Then why do you never come?” Instead, she turned away and drew an inner curtain across the window to shut out the sunlight which was beginning to slant in under the awning.

The mere fact of her not answering, and the final touch of well-being which her gesture gave, reminded him of other summer days they had spent together long rambling boy-and-girl days in the hot woods and fields, when they had never thought of talking to each other unless there was something they particularly wanted to say. His tired fancy strayed off for a second to the thought of what it would have been like come back, at the end of the day, to such a sweet community of silence; but his mind was too crowded with importunate facts for any lasting view of visionary distances. The thought faded, and he merely felt how restful it was to have her near…

“I’m glad you stayed in town: you must let me come again,” he said.

“I suppose you can’t always get away,” she answered; and she began to listen, with grave intelligent eyes, to his description of his tedious days.

With her eyes on him he felt the exquisite relief of talking about himself as he had not dared to talk to any one since his marriage. He would not for the world have confessed his discouragement, his consciousness of incapacity; to Undine and in Washington Square any hint of failure would have been taken as a criticism of what his wife demanded of him. Only to Clare Van Degen could he cry out his present despondency and his loathing of the interminable task ahead.

“A man doesn’t know till he tries it how killing uncongenial work is, and how it destroys the power of doing what one’s fit for, even if there’s time for both. But there’s Paul to be looked out for, and I daren’t chuck my job—I’m in mortal terror of its chucking me…”

Little by little he slipped into a detailed recital of all his lesser worries, the most recent of which was his experience with the Lipscombs, who, after a two months’ tenancy of the West End Avenue house, had decamped without paying their rent.

Clare laughed contemptuously. “Yes—I heard he’d come to grief and been suspended from the Stock Exchange, and I see in the papers that his wife’s retort has been to sue for a divorce.”

Ralph knew that, like all their clan, his cousin regarded a divorce-suit as a vulgar and unnecessary way of taking the public into one’s confidence. His mind flashed back to the family feast in Washington Square in celebration of his engagement. He recalled his grandfather’s chance allusion to Mrs. Lipscomb, and Undine’s answer, fluted out on her highest note: “Oh, I guess she’ll get a divorce pretty soon. He’s been a disappointment to her.”

Ralph could still hear the horrified murmur with which his mother had rebuked his laugh. For he had laughed—had thought Undine’s speech fresh and natural! Now he felt the ironic rebound of her words. Heaven knew he had been a disappointment to her; and what was there in her own feeling, or in her inherited prejudices, to prevent her seeking the same redress as Mabel Lipscomb? He wondered if the same thought were in his cousin’s mind…

They began to talk of other things: books, pictures, plays; and one by one the closed doors opened and light was let into dusty shuttered places. Clare’s mind was neither keen nor deep: Ralph, in the past, had smiled at her rash ardours and vague intensities. But she had his own range of allusions, and a great gift of momentary understanding; and he had so long beaten his thoughts out against a blank wall of incomprehension that her sympathy seemed full of insight.

She began by a question about his writing, but the subject was distasteful to him, and he turned the talk to a new book in which he had been interested. She knew enough of it to slip in the right word here and there; and thence they wandered on to kindred topics. Under the warmth of her attention his torpid ideas awoke again, and his eyes took their fill of pleasure as she leaned forward, her thin brown hands clasped on her knees and her eager face reflecting all his feelings.

There was a moment when the two currents of sensation were merged in one, and he began to feel confusedly that he was young and she was kind, and that there was nothing he would like better than to go on sitting there, not much caring what she said or how he answered, if only she would let him look at her and give him one of her thin brown hands to hold. Then the corkscrew in the back of his head dug into him again with a deeper thrust, and she seemed suddenly to recede to a great distance and be divided from him by a fog of pain. The fog lifted after a minute, but it left him queerly remote from her, from the cool room with its scents and shadows, and from all the objects which, a moment before, had so sharply impinged upon his senses. It was as though he looked at it all through a rain-blurred pane, against which his hand would strike if he held it out to her…

That impression passed also, and he found himself thinking how tired he was and how little anything mattered. He recalled the unfinished piece of work on his desk, and for a moment had the odd illusion that it was there before him…

She exclaimed: “But are you going?” and her exclamation made him aware that he had left his seat and was standing in front of her… He fancied there was some kind of appeal in her brown eyes; but she was so dim and far off that he couldn’t be sure of what she wanted, and the next moment he found himself shaking hands with her, and heard her saying something kind and cold about its having been so nice to see him…

Half way up the stairs little Paul, shining and rosy from supper, lurked in ambush for his evening game. Ralph was fond of stooping down to let the boy climb up his outstretched arms to his shoulders, but to-day, as he did so, Paul’s hug seemed to crush him in a vice, and the shout of welcome that accompanied it racked his ears like an explosion of steam-whistles. The queer distance between himself and the rest of the world was annihilated again: everything stared and glared and clutched him. He tried to turn away his face from the child’s hot kisses; and as he did so he caught sight of a mauve envelope among the hats and sticks on the hall table.

Instantly he passed Paul over to his nurse, stammered out a word about being tired, and sprang up the long flights to his study. The pain in his head had stopped, but his hands trembled as he tore open the envelope. Within it was a second letter bearing a French stamp and addressed to himself. It looked like a business communication and had apparently been sent to Undine’s hotel in Paris and forwarded to him by her hand. “Another bill!” he reflected grimly, as he threw it aside and felt in the outer envelope for her letter. There was nothing there, and after a first sharp pang of disappointment he picked up the enclosure and opened it.

Inside was a lithographed circular, headed “Confidential” and bearing the Paris address of a firm of private detectives who undertook, in conditions of attested and inviolable discretion, to investigate “delicate” situations, look up doubtful antecedents, and furnish reliable evidence of misconduct—all on the most reasonable terms.

For a long time Ralph sat and stared at this document; then he began to laugh and tossed it into the scrap-basket. After that, with a groan, he dropped his head against the edge of his writing table.

XXII

When he woke, the first thing he remembered was the fact of having cried.

He could not think how he had come to be such a fool. He hoped to heaven no one had seen him. He supposed he must have been worrying about the unfinished piece of work at the office: where was it, by the way, he wondered? Why—where he had left it the day before, of course! What a ridiculous thing to worry about—but it seemed to follow him about like a dog…

He said to himself that he must get up presently and go down to the office. Presently—when he could open his eyes. Just now there was a dead weight on them; he tried one after another in vain. The effort set him weakly trembling, and he wanted to cry again. Nonsense! He must get out of bed.

He stretched his arms out, trying to reach something to pull himself up by; but everything slipped away and evaded him. It was like trying to catch at bright short waves. Then suddenly his fingers clasped themselves about something firm and warm. A hand: a hand that gave back his pressure! The relief was inexpressible. He lay still and let the hand hold him, while mentally he went through the motions of getting up and beginning to dress. So indistinct were the boundaries between thought and action that he really felt himself moving about the room, in a queer disembodied way, as one treads the air in sleep. Then he felt the bedclothes over him and the pillows under his head.

“I MUST get up,” he said, and pulled at the hand.

It pressed him down again: down into a dim deep pool of sleep. He lay there for a long time, in a silent blackness far below light and sound; then he gradually floated to the surface with the buoyancy of a dead body. But his body had never been more alive. Jagged strokes of pain tore through it, hands dragged at it with nails that bit like teeth. They wound thongs about him, bound him, tied weights to him, tried to pull him down with them; but still he floated, floated, danced on the fiery waves of pain, with barbed light pouring down on him from an arrowy sky.

Charmed intervals of rest, blue sailings on melodious seas, alternated with the anguish. He became a leaf on the air, a feather on a current, a straw on the tide, the spray of the wave spinning itself to sunshine as the wave toppled over into gulfs of blue…

He woke on a stony beach, his legs and arms still lashed to his sides and the thongs cutting into him; but the fierce sky was hidden, and hidden by his own languid lids. He felt the ecstasy of decreasing pain, and courage came to him to open his eyes and look about him…

The beach was his own bed; the tempered light lay on familiar things, and some one was moving about in a shadowy way between bed and window. He was thirsty and some one gave him a drink. His pillow burned, and some one turned the cool side out. His brain was clear enough now for him to understand that he was ill, and to want to talk about it; but his tongue hung in his throat like a clapper in a bell. He must wait till the rope was pulled…

So time and life stole back on him, and his thoughts laboured weakly with dim fears. Slowly he cleared a way through them, adjusted himself to his strange state, and found out that he was in his own room, in his grandfather’s house, that alternating with the white-capped faces about him were those of his mother and sister, and that in a few days—if he took his beef-tea and didn’t fret—Paul would be brought up from Long Island, whither, on account of the great heat, he had been carried off by Clare Van Degen.

No one named Undine to him, and he did not speak of her. But one day, as he lay in bed in the summer twilight, he had a vision of a moment, a long way behind him—at the beginning of his illness, it must have been—when he had called out for her in his anguish, and some one had said: “She’s coming: she’ll be here next week.”

Could it be that next week was not yet here? He supposed that illness robbed one of all sense of time, and he lay still, as if in ambush, watching his scattered memories come out one by one and join themselves together. If he watched long enough he was sure he should recognize one that fitted into his picture of the day when he had asked for Undine. And at length a face came out of the twilight: a freckled face, benevolently bent over him under a starched cap. He had not seen the face for a long time, but suddenly it took shape and fitted itself into the picture…

Laura Fairford sat near by, a book on her knee. At the sound of his voice she looked up.

“What was the name of the first nurse?”

“The first—?”

“The one that went away.”

“Oh—Miss Hicks, you mean?”

“How long is it since she went?”

“It must be three weeks. She had another case.”

He thought this over carefully; then he spoke again. “Call Undine.”

She made no answer, and he repeated irritably: “Why don’t you call her? I want to speak to her.”

Mrs. Fairford laid down her book and came to him.

“She’s not here—just now.”

He dealt with this also, laboriously. “You mean she’s out—she’s not in the house?”

“I mean she hasn’t come yet.”

As she spoke Ralph felt a sudden strength and hardness in his brain and body. Everything in him became as clear as noon.

“But it was before Miss Hicks left that you told me you’d sent for her, and that she’d be here the following week. And you say Miss Hicks has been gone three weeks.”

This was what he had worked out in his head, and what he meant to say to his sister; but something seemed to snap shut in his throat, and he closed his eyes without speaking.

Even when Mr. Spragg came to see him he said nothing. They talked about his illness, about the hot weather, about the rumours that Harmon B. Driscoll was again threatened with indictment; and then Mr. Spragg pulled himself out of his chair and said: “I presume you’ll call round at the office before you leave the city.”

“Oh, yes: as soon as I’m up,” Ralph answered. They understood each other.

Clare had urged him to come down to Long Island and complete his convalescence there, but he preferred to stay in Washington Square till he should be strong enough for the journey to the Adirondacks, whither Laura had already preceded him with Paul. He did not want to see any one but his mother and grandfather till his legs could carry him to Mr. Spragg’s office. It was an oppressive day in mid-August, with a yellow mist of heat in the sky, when at last he entered the big office-building. Swirls of dust lay on the mosaic floor, and a stale smell of decayed fruit and salt air and steaming asphalt filled the place like a fog. As he shot up in the elevator some one slapped him on the back, and turning he saw Elmer Moffatt at his side, smooth and rubicund under a new straw hat.

Moffatt was loudly glad to see him. “I haven’t laid eyes on you for months. At the old stand still?”

“So am I,” he added, as Ralph assented. “Hope to see you there again some day. Don’t forget it’s MY turn this time: glad if I can be any use to you. So long.” Ralph’s weak bones ached under his handshake.

“How’s Mrs. Marvell?” he turned back from his landing to call out; and Ralph answered: “Thanks; she’s very well.”

Mr. Spragg sat alone in his murky inner office, the fly-blown engraving of Daniel Webster above his head and the congested scrap-basket beneath his feet. He looked fagged and sallow, like the day.

Ralph sat down on the other side of the desk. For a moment his throat contracted as it had when he had tried to question his sister; then he asked: “Where’s Undine?”

Mr. Spragg glanced at the calendar that hung from a hat-peg on the door. Then he released the Masonic emblem from his grasp, drew out his watch and consulted it critically.

“If the train’s on time I presume she’s somewhere between Chicago and Omaha round about now.”

Ralph stared at him, wondering if the heat had gone to his head. “I don’t understand.”

“The Twentieth Century’s generally considered the best route to Dakota,” explained Mr. Spragg, who pronounced the word ROWT.

“Do you mean to say Undine’s in the United States?”

Mr. Spragg’s lower lip groped for the phantom toothpick. “Why, let me see: hasn’t Dakota been a state a year or two now?”

“Oh, God—” Ralph cried, pushing his chair back violently and striding across the narrow room.

As he turned, Mr. Spragg stood up and advanced a few steps. He had given up the quest for the toothpick, and his drawn-in lips were no more than a narrow depression in his beard. He stood before Ralph, absently shaking the loose change in his trouser-pockets.

Ralph felt the same hardness and lucidity that had come to him when he had heard his sister’s answer.

“She’s gone, you mean? Left me? With another man?”

Mr. Spragg drew himself up with a kind of slouching majesty. “My daughter is not that style. I understand Undine thinks there have been mistakes on both sides. She considers the tie was formed too hastily. I believe desertion is the usual plea in such cases.”

Ralph stared about him, hardly listening. He did not resent his father-in-law’s tone. In a dim way he guessed that Mr. Spragg was suffering hardly less than himself. But nothing was clear to him save the monstrous fact suddenly upheaved in his path. His wife had left him, and the plan for her evasion had been made and executed while he lay helpless: she had seized the opportunity of his illness to keep him in ignorance of her design. The humour of it suddenly struck him and he laughed.

“Do you mean to tell me that Undine’s divorcing ME?”

“I presume that’s her plan,” Mr. Spragg admitted.

“For desertion?” Ralph pursued, still laughing.

His father-in-law hesitated a moment; then he answered: “You’ve always done all you could for my daughter. There wasn’t any other plea she could think of. She presumed this would be the most agreeable to your family.”

“It was good of her to think of that!”

Mr. Spragg’s only comment was a sigh.

“Does she imagine I won’t fight it?” Ralph broke out with sudden passion.

His father-in-law looked at him thoughtfully. “I presume you realize it ain’t easy to change Undine, once she’s set on a thing.”

“Perhaps not. But if she really means to apply for a divorce I can make it a little less easy for her to get.”

“That’s so,” Mr. Spragg conceded. He turned back to his revolving chair, and seating himself in it began to drum on the desk with cigar-stained fingers.

“And by God, I will!” Ralph thundered. Anger was the only emotion in him now. He had been fooled, cheated, made a mock of; but the score was not settled yet. He turned back and stood before Mr. Spragg.

“I suppose she’s gone with Van Degen?”

“My daughter’s gone alone, sir. I saw her off at the station. I understood she was to join a lady friend.”

At every point Ralph felt his hold slip off the surface of his father-in-law’s impervious fatalism.

“Does she suppose Van Degen’s going to marry her?”

“Undine didn’t mention her future plans to me.” After a moment Mr. Spragg appended: “If she had, I should have declined to discuss them with her.” Ralph looked at him curiously, perceiving that he intended in this negative way to imply his disapproval of his daughter’s course.

“I shall fight it—I shall fight it!” the young man cried again. “You may tell her I shall fight it to the end!”

Mr. Spragg pressed the nib of his pen against the dust-coated inkstand. “I suppose you would have to engage a lawyer. She’ll know it that way,” he remarked.

“She’ll know it—you may count on that!”

Ralph had begun to laugh again. Suddenly he heard his own laugh and it pulled him up. What was he laughing about? What was he talking about? The thing was to act—to hold his tongue and act. There was no use uttering windy threats to this broken-spirited old man.

A fury of action burned in Ralph, pouring light into his mind and strength into his muscles. He caught up his hat and turned to the door.

As he opened it Mr. Spragg rose again and came forward with his slow shambling step. He laid his hand on Ralph’s arm.

“I’d ‘a’ given anything—anything short of my girl herself—not to have this happen to you, Ralph Marvell.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Ralph.

They looked at each other for a moment; then Mr. Spragg added: “But it HAS happened, you know. Bear that in mind. Nothing you can do will change it. Time and again, I’ve found that a good thing to remember.”

XXIII

In the Adirondacks Ralph Marvell sat day after day on the balcony of his little house above the lake, staring at the great white cloud-reflections in the water and at the dark line of trees that closed them in. Now and then he got into the canoe and paddled himself through a winding chain of ponds to some lonely clearing in the forest; and there he lay on his back in the pine-needles and watched the great clouds form and dissolve themselves above his head.

All his past life seemed to be symbolized by the building-up and breaking-down of those fluctuating shapes, which incalculable wind-currents perpetually shifted and remodelled or swept from the zenith like a pinch of dust. His sister told him that he looked well—better than he had in years; and there were moments when his listlessness, his stony insensibility to the small pricks and frictions of daily life, might have passed for the serenity of recovered health.

There was no one with whom he could speak of Undine. His family had thrown over the whole subject a pall of silence which even Laura Fairford shrank from raising. As for his mother, Ralph had seen at once that the idea of talking over the situation was positively frightening to her. There was no provision for such emergencies in the moral order of Washington Square. The affair was a “scandal,” and it was not in the Dagonet tradition to acknowledge the existence of scandals. Ralph recalled a dim memory of his childhood, the tale of a misguided friend of his mother’s who had left her husband for a more congenial companion, and who, years later, returning ill and friendless to New York, had appealed for sympathy to Mrs. Marvell. The latter had not refused to give it; but she had put on her black cashmere and two veils when she went to see her unhappy friend, and had never mentioned these errands of mercy to her husband.

Ralph suspected that the constraint shown by his mother and sister was partly due to their having but a dim and confused view of what had happened. In their vocabulary the word “divorce” was wrapped in such a dark veil of innuendo as no ladylike hand would care to lift. They had not reached the point of differentiating divorces, but classed them indistinctively as disgraceful incidents, in which the woman was always to blame, but the man, though her innocent victim, was yet inevitably contaminated. The time involved in the “proceedings” was viewed as a penitential season during which it behoved the family of the persons concerned to behave as if they were dead; yet any open allusion to the reason for adopting such an attitude would have been regarded as the height of indelicacy.

Mr. Dagonet’s notion of the case was almost as remote from reality. All he asked was that his grandson should “thrash” somebody, and he could not be made to understand that the modern drama of divorce is sometimes cast without a Lovelace.

“You might as well tell me there was nobody but Adam in the garden when Eve picked the apple. You say your wife was discontented? No woman ever knows she’s discontented till some man tells her so. My God! I’ve seen smash-ups before now; but I never yet saw a marriage dissolved like a business partnership. Divorce without a lover? Why, it’s—it’s as unnatural as getting drunk on lemonade.”

After this first explosion Mr. Dagonet also became silent; and Ralph perceived that what annoyed him most was the fact of the “scandal’s” not being one in any gentlemanly sense of the word. It was like some nasty business mess, about which Mr. Dagonet couldn’t pretend to have an opinion, since such things didn’t happen to men of his kind. That such a thing should have happened to his only grandson was probably the bitterest experience of his pleasantly uneventful life; and it added a touch of irony to Ralph’s unhappiness to know how little, in the whole affair, he was cutting the figure Mr. Dagonet expected him to cut.

At first he had chafed under the taciturnity surrounding him: had passionately longed to cry out his humiliation, his rebellion, his despair. Then he began to feel the tonic effect of silence; and the next stage was reached when it became clear to him that there was nothing to say. There were thoughts and thoughts: they bubbled up perpetually from the black springs of his hidden misery, they stole on him in the darkness of night, they blotted out the light of day; but when it came to putting them into words and applying them to the external facts of the case, they seemed totally unrelated to it. One more white and sun-touched glory had gone from his sky; but there seemed no way of connecting that with such practical issues as his being called on to decide whether Paul was to be put in knickerbockers or trousers, and whether he should go back to Washington Square for the winter or hire a small house for himself and his son.

The latter question was ultimately decided by his remaining under his grandfather’s roof. November found him back in the office again, in fairly good health, with an outer skin of indifference slowly forming over his lacerated soul. There had been a hard minute to live through when he came back to his old brown room in Washington Square. The walls and tables were covered with photographs of Undine: effigies of all shapes and sizes, expressing every possible sentiment dear to the photographic tradition. Ralph had gathered them all up when he had moved from West End Avenue after Undine’s departure for Europe, and they throned over his other possessions as her image had throned over his future the night he had sat in that very room and dreamed of soaring up with her into the blue…

It was impossible to go on living with her photographs about him; and one evening, going up to his room after dinner, he began to unhang them from the walls, and to gather them up from bookshelves and mantelpiece and tables. Then he looked about for some place in which to hide them. There were drawers under his bookcases; but they were full of old discarded things, and even if he emptied the drawers, the photographs, in their heavy frames, were almost all too large to fit into them. He turned next to the top shelf of his cupboard; but here the nurse had stored Paul’s old toys, his sand-pails, shovels and croquet-box. Every corner was packed with the vain impedimenta of living, and the mere thought of clearing a space in the chaos was too great an effort.

He began to replace the pictures one by one; and the last was still in his hand when he heard his sister’s voice outside. He hurriedly put the portrait back in its usual place on his writing-table, and Mrs. Fairford, who had been dining in Washington Square, and had come up to bid him good night, flung her arms about him in a quick embrace and went down to her carriage.

The next afternoon, when he came home from the office, he did not at first see any change in his room; but when he had lit his pipe and thrown himself into his armchair he noticed that the photograph of his wife’s picture by Popple no longer faced him from the mantelpiece. He turned to his writing-table, but her image had vanished from there too; then his eye, making the circuit of the walls, perceived that they also had been stripped. Not a single photograph of Undine was left; yet so adroitly had the work of elimination been done, so ingeniously the remaining objects readjusted, that the change attracted no attention.

Ralph was angry, sore, ashamed. He felt as if Laura, whose hand he instantly detected, had taken a cruel pleasure in her work, and for an instant he hated her for it. Then a sense of relief stole over him. He was glad he could look about him without meeting Undine’s eyes, and he understood that what had been done to his room he must do to his memory and his imagination: he must so readjust his mind that, whichever way he turned his thoughts, her face should no longer confront him. But that was a task that Laura could not perform for him, a task to be accomplished only by the hard continuous tension of his will.

With the setting in of the mood of silence all desire to fight his wife’s suit died out. The idea of touching publicly on anything that had passed between himself and Undine had become unthinkable. Insensibly he had been subdued to the point of view about him, and the idea of calling on the law to repair his shattered happiness struck him as even more grotesque than it was degrading. Nevertheless, some contradictory impulse of his divided spirit made him resent, on the part of his mother and sister, a too-ready acceptance of his attitude. There were moments when their tacit assumption that his wife was banished and forgotten irritated him like the hushed tread of sympathizers about the bed of an invalid who will not admit that he suffers.

His irritation was aggravated by the discovery that Mrs. Marvell and Laura had already begun to treat Paul as if he were an orphan. One day, coming unnoticed into the nursery, Ralph heard the boy ask when his mother was coming back; and Mrs. Fairford, who was with him, answered: “She’s not coming back, dearest; and you’re not to speak of her to father.”

Ralph, when the boy was out of hearing, rebuked his sister for her answer. “I don’t want you to talk of his mother as if she were dead. I don’t want you to forbid Paul to speak of her.”

Laura, though usually so yielding, defended herself. “What’s the use of encouraging him to speak of her when he’s never to see her? The sooner he forgets her the better.”

Ralph pondered. “Later—if she asks to see him—I shan’t refuse.”

Mrs. Fairford pressed her lips together to check the answer: “She never will!”

Ralph heard it, nevertheless, and let it pass. Nothing gave him so profound a sense of estrangement from his former life as the conviction that his sister was probably right. He did not really believe that Undine would ever ask to see her boy; but if she did he was determined not to refuse her request.

Time wore on, the Christmas holidays came and went, and the winter continued to grind out the weary measure of its days. Toward the end of January Ralph received a registered letter, addressed to him at his office, and bearing in the corner of the envelope the names of a firm of Sioux Falls attorneys. He instantly divined that it contained the legal notification of his wife’s application for divorce, and as he wrote his name in the postman’s book he smiled grimly at the thought that the stroke of his pen was doubtless signing her release. He opened the letter, found it to be what he had expected, and locked it away in his desk without mentioning the matter to any one.

He supposed that with the putting away of this document he was thrusting the whole subject out of sight; but not more than a fortnight later, as he sat in the Subway on his way down-town, his eye was caught by his own name on the first page of the heavily headlined paper which the unshaved occupant of the next seat held between grimy fists. The blood rushed to Ralph’s forehead as he looked over the man’s arm and read: “Society Leader Gets Decree,” and beneath it the subordinate clause: “Says Husband Too Absorbed In Business To Make Home Happy.” For weeks afterward, wherever he went, he felt that blush upon his forehead. For the first time in his life the coarse fingering of public curiosity had touched the secret places of his soul, and nothing that had gone before seemed as humiliating as this trivial comment on his tragedy. The paragraph continued on its way through the press, and whenever he took up a newspaper he seemed to come upon it, slightly modified, variously developed, but always reverting with a kind of unctuous irony to his financial preoccupations and his wife’s consequent loneliness. The phrase was even taken up by the paragraph writer, called forth excited letters from similarly situated victims, was commented on in humorous editorials and served as a text for pulpit denunciations of the growing craze for wealth; and finally, at his dentist’s, Ralph came across it in a Family Weekly, as one of the “Heart problems” propounded to subscribers, with a Gramophone, a Straight-front Corset and a Vanity-box among the prizes offered for its solution.

XXIV

“If you’d only had the sense to come straight to me, Undine Spragg! There isn’t a tip I couldn’t have given you—not one!”

This speech, in which a faintly contemptuous compassion for her friend’s case was blent with the frankest pride in her own, probably represented the nearest approach to “tact” that Mrs. James J. Rolliver had yet acquired. Undine was impartial enough to note in it a distinct advance on the youthful methods of Indiana Frusk; yet it required a good deal of self-control to take the words to herself with a smile, while they seemed to be laying a visible scarlet welt across the pale face she kept valiantly turned to her friend. The fact that she must permit herself to be pitied by Indiana Frusk gave her the uttermost measure of the depth to which her fortunes had fallen. This abasement was inflicted on her in the staring gold apartment of the Hotel Nouveau Luxe in which the Rollivers had established themselves on their recent arrival in Paris. The vast drawingroom, adorned only by two high-shouldered gilt baskets of orchids drooping on their wires, reminded Undine of the “Looey suite” in which the opening scenes of her own history had been enacted; and the resemblance and the difference were emphasized by the fact that the image of her past self was not inaccurately repeated in the triumphant presence of Indiana Rolliver.

“There isn’t a tip I couldn’t have given you—not one!” Mrs. Rolliver reproachfully repeated; and all Undine’s superiorities and discriminations seemed to shrivel up in the crude blaze of the other’s solid achievement.

There was little comfort in noting, for one’s private delectation, that Indiana spoke of her husband as “Mr. Rolliver,” that she twanged a piercing R, that one of her shoulders was still higher than the other, and that her striking dress was totally unsuited to the hour, the place and the occasion. She still did and was all that Undine had so sedulously learned not to be and to do; but to dwell on these obstacles to her success was but to be more deeply impressed by the fact that she had nevertheless succeeded.

Not much more than a year had elapsed since Undine Marvell, sitting in the drawingroom of another Parisian hotel, had heard the immense orchestral murmur of Paris rise through the open windows like the ascending movement of her own hopes. The immense murmur still sounded on, deafening and implacable as some elemental force; and the discord in her fate no more disturbed it than the motor wheels rolling by under the windows were disturbed by the particles of dust that they ground to finer powder as they passed.

“I could have told you one thing right off,” Mrs. Rolliver went on with her ringing energy. “And that is, to get your divorce first thing. A divorce is always a good thing to have: you never can tell when you may want it. You ought to have attended to that before you even BEGAN with Peter Van Degen.”

Undine listened, irresistibly impressed. “Did YOU?” she asked; but Mrs. Rolliver, at this, grew suddenly veiled and sibylline. She wound her big bejewelled hand through her pearls—there were ropes and ropes of them—and leaned back, modestly sinking her lids.

“I’m here, anyhow,” she rejoined, with “CIRCUMSPICE!” in look and tone.

Undine, obedient to the challenge, continued to gaze at the pearls. They were real; there was no doubt about that. And so was Indiana’s marriage—if she kept out of certain states.

“Don’t you see,” Mrs. Rolliver continued, “that having to leave him when you did, and rush off to Dakota for six months, was—was giving him too much time to think; and giving it at the wrong time, too?” “Oh, I see. But what could I do? I’m not an immoral woman.”

“Of course not, dearest. You were merely thoughtless that’s what I meant by saying you ought to have had your divorce ready.”

A flicker of self-esteem caused Undine to protest. “It wouldn’t have made any difference. His wife would never have given him up.”

“She’s so crazy about him?”

“No: she hates him so. And she hates me too, because she’s in love with my husband.”

Indiana bounced out of her lounging attitude and struck her hands together with a rattle of rings.

“In love with your husband? What’s the matter, then? Why on earth didn’t the four of you fix it up together?”

“You don’t understand.” (It was an undoubted relief to be able, at last, to say that to Indiana!) “Clare Van Degen thinks divorce wrong—or rather awfully vulgar.”

“VULGAR?” Indiana flamed. “If that isn’t just too much! A woman who’s in love with another woman’s husband? What does she think refined, I’d like to know? Having a lover, I suppose—like the women in these nasty French plays? I’ve told Mr. Rolliver I won’t go to the theatre with him again in Paris—it’s too utterly low. And the swell society’s just as bad: it’s simply rotten. Thank goodness I was brought up in a place where there’s some sense of decency left!” She looked compassionately at Undine. “It was New York that demoralized you—and I don’t blame you for it. Out at Apex you’d have acted different. You never NEVER would have given way to your feelings before you’d got your divorce.”

A slow blush rose to Undine’s forehead.

“He seemed so unhappy—” she murmured.

“Oh, I KNOW!” said Indiana in a tone of cold competence. She gave Undine an impatient glance. “What was the understanding between you, when you left Europe last August to go out to Dakota?”

“Peter was to go to Reno in the autumn—so that it wouldn’t look too much as if we were acting together. I was to come to Chicago to see him on his way out there.”

“And he never came?”

“No.”

“And he stopped writing?”

“Oh, he never writes.”

Indiana heaved a deep sigh of intelligence. “There’s one perfectly clear rule: never let out of your sight a man who doesn’t write.”

“I know. That’s why I stayed with him—those few weeks last summer….”

Indiana sat thinking, her fine shallow eyes fixed unblinkingly on her friend’s embarrassed face.

“I suppose there isn’t anybody else—?”

“Anybody—?”

“Well—now you’ve got your divorce: anybody else it would come in handy for?”

This was harder to bear than anything that had gone before: Undine could not have borne it if she had not had a purpose. “Mr. Van Degen owes it to me—” she began with an air of wounded dignity.

“Yes, yes: I know. But that’s just talk. If there IS anybody else—”

“I can’t imagine what you think of me, Indiana!”

Indiana, without appearing to resent this challenge, again lost herself in meditation.

“Well, I’ll tell him he’s just GOT to see you,” she finally emerged from it to say.

Undine gave a quick upward look: this was what she had been waiting for ever since she had read, a few days earlier, in the columns of her morning journal, that Mr. Peter Van Degen and Mr. and Mrs. James J. Rolliver had been fellow-passengers on board the Semantic. But she did not betray her expectations by as much as the tremor of an eye-lash. She knew her friend well enough to pour out to her the expected tribute of surprise.

“Why, do you mean to say you know him, Indiana?”

“Mercy, yes! He’s round here all the time. He crossed on the steamer with us, and Mr. Rolliver’s taken a fancy to him,” Indiana explained, in the tone of the absorbed bride to whom her husband’s preferences are the sole criterion.

Undine turned a tear-suffused gaze on her. “Oh, Indiana, if I could only see him again I know it would be all right! He’s awfully, awfully fond of me; but his family have influenced him against me—”

“I know what THAT is!” Mrs. Rolliver interjected.

“But perhaps,” Undine continued, “it would be better if I could meet him first without his knowing beforehand—without your telling him … I love him too much to reproach him!” she added nobly.

Indiana pondered: it was clear that, though the nobility of the sentiment impressed her, she was disinclined to renounce the idea of taking a more active part in her friend’s rehabilitation. But Undine went on: “Of course you’ve found out by this time that he’s just a big spoiled baby. Afterward—when I’ve seen him—if you’d talk to him; or it you’d only just let him BE with you, and see how perfectly happy you and Mr. Rolliver are!”

Indiana seized on this at once. “You mean that what he wants is the influence of a home like ours? Yes, yes, I understand. I tell you what I’ll do: I’ll just ask him round to dine, and let you know the day, without telling him beforehand that you’re coming.”

“Oh, Indiana!” Undine held her in a close embrace, and then drew away to say: “I’m so glad I found you. You must go round with me everywhere. There are lots of people here I want you to know.”

Mrs. Rolliver’s expression changed from vague sympathy to concentrated interest. “I suppose it’s awfully gay here? Do you go round a great deal with the American set?”

Undine hesitated for a fraction of a moment. “There are a few of them who are rather jolly. But I particularly want you to meet my friend the Marquis Roviano—he’s from Rome; and a lovely Austrian woman, Baroness Adelschein.”

Her friend’s face was brushed by a shade of distrust. “I don’t know as I care much about meeting foreigners,” she said indifferently.

Undine smiled: it was agreeable at last to be able to give Indiana a “point” as valuable as any of hers on divorce.

“Oh, some of them are awfully attractive; and THEY’LL make you meet the Americans.”

Indiana caught this on the bound: one began to see why she had got on in spite of everything.

“Of course I’d love to know your friends,” she said, kissing Undine; who answered, giving back the kiss:

“You know there’s nothing on earth I wouldn’t do for you.”

Indiana drew back to look at her with a comic grimace under which a shade of anxiety was visible. “Well, that’s a pretty large order. But there’s just one thing you CAN do, dearest: please to let Mr. Rolliver alone!”

“Mr. Rolliver, my dear?” Undine’s laugh showed that she took this for unmixed comedy. “That’s a nice way to remind me that you’re heaps and heaps better-looking than I am!”

Indiana gave her an acute glance. “Millard Binch didn’t think so—not even at the very end.”

“Oh, poor Millard!” The women’s smiles mingled easily over the common reminiscence, and once again, on the threshold. Undine enfolded her friend. In the light of the autumn afternoon she paused a moment at the door of the Nouveau Luxe, and looked aimlessly forth at the brave spectacle in which she seemed no longer to have a stake.

Many of her old friends had already returned to Paris: the Harvey Shallums, May Beringer, Dicky Bowles and other westward-bound nomads lingering on for a glimpse of the autumn theatres and fashions before hurrying back to inaugurate the New York season. A year ago Undine would have had no difficulty in introducing Indiana Rolliver to this group—a group above which her own aspirations already beat an impatient wing. Now her place in it had become too precarious for her to force an entrance for her protectress. Her New York friends were at no pains to conceal from her that in their opinion her divorce had been a blunder. Their logic was that of Apex reversed. Since she had not been “sure” of Van Degen, why in the world, they asked, had she thrown away a position she WAS sure of? Mrs. Harvey Shallum, in particular, had not scrupled to put the question squarely. “Chelles was awfully taken—he would have introduced you everywhere. I thought you were wild to know smart French people; I thought Harvey and I weren’t good enough for you any longer. And now you’ve done your best to spoil everything! Of course I feel for you tremendously—that’s the reason why I’m talking so frankly. You must be horribly depressed. Come and dine tonight—or no, if you don’t mind I’d rather you chose another evening. I’d forgotten that I’d asked the Jim Driscolls, and it might be uncomfortable—for YOU….”

In another world she was still welcome, at first perhaps even more so than before: the world, namely, to which she had proposed to present Indiana Rolliver. Roviano, Madame Adelschein, and a few of the freer spirits of her old St. Moritz band, reappearing in Paris with the close of the watering-place season, had quickly discovered her and shown a keen interest in her liberation. It appeared in some mysterious way to make her more available for their purpose, and she found that, in the character of the last American divorcee, she was even regarded as eligible to the small and intimate inner circle of their loosely-knit association. At first she could not make out what had entitled her to this privilege, and increasing enlightenment produced a revolt of the Apex puritanism which, despite some odd accommodations and compliances, still carried its head so high in her.

Undine had been perfectly sincere in telling Indiana Rolliver that she was not “an Immoral woman.” The pleasures for which her sex took such risks had never attracted her, and she did not even crave the excitement of having it thought that they did. She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability; and despite her surface-sophistication her notion of amusement was hardly less innocent than when she had hung on the plumber’s fence with Indiana Frusk. It gave her, therefore, no satisfaction to find herself included among Madame Adelschein’s intimates. It embarrassed her to feel that she was expected to be “queer” and “different,” to respond to passwords and talk in innuendo, to associate with the equivocal and the subterranean and affect to despise the ingenuous daylight joys which really satisfied her soul. But the business shrewdness which was never quite dormant in her suggested that this was not the moment for such scruples. She must make the best of what she could get and wait her chance of getting something better; and meanwhile the most practical use to which she could put her shady friends was to flash their authentic nobility in the dazzled eyes of Mrs. Rolliver.

With this object in view she made haste, in a fashionable tea-room of the rue de Rivoli, to group about Indiana the most titled members of the band; and the felicity of the occasion would have been unmarred had she not suddenly caught sight of Raymond de Chelles sitting on the other side of the room.

She had not seen Chelles since her return to Paris. It had seemed preferable to leave their meeting to chance and the present chance might have served as well as another but for the fact that among his companions were two or three of the most eminent ladies of the proud quarter beyond the Seine. It was what Undine, in moments of discouragement, characterized as “her luck” that one of these should be the hated Miss Wincher of Potash Springs, who had now become the Marquise de Trezac. Undine knew that Chelles and his compatriots, however scandalized at her European companions, would be completely indifferent to Mrs. Rolliver’s appearance; but one gesture of Madame de Trezac’s eyeglass would wave Indiana to her place and thus brand the whole party as “wrong.”

All this passed through Undine’s mind in the very moment of her noting the change of expression with which Chelles had signalled his recognition. If their encounter could have occurred in happier conditions it might have had far-reaching results. As it was, the crowded state of the tea-room, and the distance between their tables, sufficiently excused his restricting his greeting to an eager bow; and Undine went home heavy-hearted from this first attempt to reconstruct her past.

Her spirits were not lightened by the developments of the next few days. She kept herself well in the foreground of Indiana’s life, and cultivated toward the rarely-visible Rolliver a manner in which impersonal admiration for the statesman was tempered with the politest indifference to the man. Indiana seemed to do justice to her efforts and to be reassured by the result; but still there came no hint of a reward. For a time Undine restrained the question on her lips; but one afternoon, when she had inducted Indiana into the deepest mysteries of Parisian complexion-making, the importance of the service and the confidential mood it engendered seemed to warrant a discreet allusion to their bargain.

Indiana leaned back among her cushions with an embarrassed laugh.

“Oh, my dear, I’ve been meaning to tell you—it’s off, I’m afraid. The dinner is, I mean. You see, Mr. Van Degen has seen you ‘round with me, and the very minute I asked him to come and dine he guessed—”

“He guessed—and he wouldn’t?”

“Well, no. He wouldn’t. I hate to tell you.”

“Oh—” Undine threw off a vague laugh. “Since you’re intimate enough for him to tell you THAT he must, have told you more—told you something to justify his behaviour. He couldn’t—even Peter Van Degen couldn’t—just simply have said to you: ‘I wont see her.’”

Mrs. Rolliver hesitated, visibly troubled to the point of regretting her intervention.

“He DID say more?” Undine insisted. “He gave you a reason?

“He said you’d know.”

“Oh how base—how base!” Undine was trembling with one of her littlegirl rages, the storms of destructive fury before which Mr. and Mrs. Spragg had cowered when she was a charming golden-curled cherub. But life had administered some of the discipline which her parents had spared her, and she pulled herself together with a gasp of pain. “Of course he’s been turned against me. His wife has the whole of New York behind her, and I’ve no one; but I know it would be all right if I could only see him.”

Her friend made no answer, and Undine pursued, with an irrepressible outbreak of her old vehemence: “Indiana Rolliver, if you won’t do it for me I’ll go straight off to his hotel this very minute. I’ll wait there in the hall till he sees me!”

Indiana lifted a protesting hand. “Don’t, Undine—not that!”

“Why not?”

“Well—I wouldn’t, that’s all.”

“You wouldn’t? Why wouldn’t you? You must have a reason.” Undine faced her with levelled brows. “Without a reason you can’t have changed so utterly since our last talk. You were positive enough then that I had a right to make him see me.”

Somewhat to her surprise, Indiana made no effort to elude the challenge. “Yes, I did think so then. But I know now that it wouldn’t do you the least bit of good.”

“Have they turned him so completely against me? I don’t care if they have! I know him—I can get him back.”

“That’s the trouble.” Indiana shed on her a gaze of cold compassion. “It’s not that any one has turned him against you. It’s worse than that—”

“What can be?”

“You’ll hate me if I tell you.”

“Then you’d better make him tell me himself!”

“I can’t. I tried to. The trouble is that it was YOU—something you did, I mean. Something he found out about you—”

Undine, to restrain a spring of anger, had to clutch both arms of her chair. “About me? How fearfully false! Why, I’ve never even LOOKED at anybody—!”

“It’s nothing of that kind.” Indiana’s mournful head-shake seemed to deplore, in Undine, an unsuspected moral obtuseness. “It’s the way you acted to your own husband.”

“I—my—to Ralph? HE reproaches me for that? Peter Van Degen does?” “Well, for one particular thing. He says that the very day you went off with him last year you got a cable from New York telling you to come back at once to Mr. Marvell, who was desperately ill.”

“How on earth did he know?” The cry escaped Undine before she could repress it.

“It’s true, then?” Indiana exclaimed. “Oh, Undine—”

Undine sat speechless and motionless, the anger frozen to terror on her lips.

Mrs. Rolliver turned on her the reproachful gaze of the deceived benefactress. “I didn’t believe it when he told me; I’d never have thought it of you. Before you’d even applied for your divorce!”

Undine made no attempt to deny the charge or to defend herself. For a moment she was lost in the pursuit of an unseizable clue—the explanation of this monstrous last perversity of fate. Suddenly she rose to her feet with a set face.

“The Marvells must have told him—the beasts!” It relieved her to be able to cry it out.

“It was your husband’s sister—what did you say her name was? When you didn’t answer her cable, she cabled Mr. Van Degen to find out where you were and tell you to come straight back.”

Undine stared. “He never did!”

“No.”

“Doesn’t that show you the story’s all trumped up?”

Indiana shook her head. “He said nothing to you about it because he was with you when you received the first cable, and you told him it was from your sister-in-law, just worrying you as usual to go home; and when he asked if there was anything else in it you said there wasn’t another thing.”

Undine, intently following her, caught at this with a spring. “Then he knew it all along—he admits that? And it made no earthly difference to him at the time?” She turned almost victoriously on her friend. “Did he happen to explain THAT, I wonder?”

“Yes.” Indiana’s longanimity grew almost solemn. “It came over him gradually, he said. One day when he wasn’t feeling very well he thought to himself: ‘Would she act like that to ME if I was dying?’ And after that he never felt the same to you.” Indiana lowered her empurpled lids. “Men have their feelings too—even when they’re carried away by passion.” After a pause she added: “I don’t know as I can blame him. Undine. You see, you were his ideal.”

XXV

Undine Marvell, for the next few months, tasted all the accumulated bitterness of failure. After January the drifting hordes of her compatriots had scattered to the four quarters of the globe, leaving Paris to resume, under its low grey sky, its compacter winter personality. Noting, from her more and more deserted corner, each least sign of the social revival, Undine felt herself as stranded and baffled as after the ineffectual summers of her girlhood. She was not without possible alternatives; but the sense of what she had lost took the savour from all that was left. She might have attached herself to some migratory group winged for Italy or Egypt; but the prospect of travel did not in itself appeal to her, and she was doubtful of its social benefit. She lacked the adventurous curiosity which seeks its occasion in the unknown; and though she could work doggedly for a given object the obstacles to be overcome had to be as distinct as the prize. Her one desire was to get back an equivalent of the precise value she had lost in ceasing to be Ralph Marvell’s wife. Her new visiting-card, bearing her Christian name in place of her husband’s, was like the coin of a debased currency testifying to her diminished trading capacity. Her restricted means, her vacant days, all the minor irritations of her life, were as nothing compared to this sense of a lost advantage. Even in the narrowed field of a Parisian winter she might have made herself a place in some more or less extra-social world; but her experiments in this line gave her no pleasure proportioned to the possible derogation. She feared to be associated with “the wrong people,” and scented a shade of disrespect in every amicable advance. The more pressing attentions of one or two men she had formerly known filled her with a glow of outraged pride, and for the first time in her life she felt that even solitude might be preferable to certain kinds of society. Since ill health was the most plausible pretext for seclusion, it was almost a relief to find that she was really growing “nervous” and sleeping badly. The doctor she summoned advised her trying a small quiet place on the Riviera, not too near the sea; and thither in the early days of December, she transported herself with her maid and an omnibus-load of luggage.

The place disconcerted her by being really small and quiet, and for a few days she struggled against the desire for flight. She had never before known a world as colourless and negative as that of the large white hotel where everybody went to bed at nine, and donkey-rides over stony hills were the only alternative to slow drives along dusty roads. Many of the dwellers in this temple of repose found even these exercises too stimulating, and preferred to sit for hours under the palms in the garden, playing Patience, embroidering, or reading odd volumes of Tauchnitz. Undine, driven by despair to an inspection of the hotel bookshelves, discovered that scarcely any work they contained was complete; but this did not seem to trouble the readers, who continued to feed their leisure with mutilated fiction, from which they occasionally raised their eyes to glance mistrustfully at the new arrival sweeping the garden gravel with her frivolous draperies. The inmates of the hotel were of different nationalities, but their racial differences were levelled by the stamp of a common mediocrity. All differences of tongue, of custom, of physiognomy, disappeared in this deep community of insignificance, which was like some secret bond, with the manifold signs and passwords of its ignorances and its imperceptions. It was not the heterogeneous mediocrity of the American summer hotel where the lack of any standard is the nearest approach to a tie, but an organized codified dulness, in conscious possession of its rights, and strong in the voluntary ignorance of any others.

It took Undine a long time to accustom herself to such an atmosphere, and meanwhile she fretted, fumed and flaunted, or abandoned herself to long periods of fruitless brooding. Sometimes a flame of anger shot up in her, dismally illuminating the path she had travelled and the blank wall to which it led. At other moments past and present were enveloped in a dull fog of rancour which distorted and faded even the image she presented to her morning mirror. There were days when every young face she saw left in her a taste of poison. But when she compared herself with the specimens of her sex who plied their languid industries under the palms, or looked away as she passed them in hall or staircase, her spirits rose, and she rang for her maid and dressed herself in her newest and vividest. These were unprofitable triumphs, however. She never made one of her attacks on the organized disapproval of the community without feeling she had lost ground by it; and the next day she would lie in bed and send down capricious orders for food, which her maid would presently remove untouched, with instructions to transmit her complaints to the landlord.

Sometimes the events of the past year, ceaselessly revolving through her brain, became no longer a subject for criticism or justification but simply a series of pictures monotonously unrolled. Hour by hour, in such moods, she relived the incidents of her flight with Peter Van Degen: the part of her career that, since it had proved a failure, seemed least like herself and most difficult to justify. She had gone away with him, and had lived with him for two months: she, Undine Marvell, to whom respectability was the breath of life, to whom such follies had always been unintelligible and therefore inexcusable.—She had done this incredible thing, and she had done it from a motive that seemed, at the time, as clear, as logical, as free from the distorting mists of sentimentality, as any of her father’s financial enterprises. It had been a bold move, but it had been as carefully calculated as the happiest Wall Street “stroke.” She had gone away with Peter because, after the decisive scene in which she had put her power to the test, to yield to him seemed the surest means of victory. Even to her practical intelligence it was clear that an immediate dash to Dakota might look too calculated; and she had preserved her self-respect by telling herself that she was really his wife, and in no way to blame if the law delayed to ratify the bond. She was still persuaded of the justness of her reasoning; but she now saw that it had left certain risks out of account. Her life with Van Degen had taught her many things. The two had wandered from place to place, spending a great deal of money, always more and more money; for the first time in her life she had been able to buy everything she wanted. For a while this had kept her amused and busy; but presently she began to perceive that her companion’s view of their relation was not the same as hers. She saw that he had always meant it to be an unavowed tie, screened by Mrs. Shallum’s companionship and Clare’s careless tolerance; and that on those terms he would have been ready to shed on their adventure the brightest blaze of notoriety. But since Undine had insisted on being carried off like a sentimental school-girl he meant to shroud the affair in mystery, and was as zealous in concealing their relation as she was bent on proclaiming it. In the “powerful” novels which Popple was fond of lending her she had met with increasing frequency the type of heroine who scorns to love clandestinely, and proclaims the sanctity of passion and the moral duty of obeying its call. Undine had been struck by these arguments as justifying and even ennobling her course, and had let Peter understand that she had been actuated by the highest motives in openly associating her life with his; but he had opposed a placid insensibility to these allusions, and had persisted in treating her as though their journey were the kind of escapade that a man of the world is bound to hide. She had expected him to take her to all the showy places where couples like themselves are relieved from a too sustained contemplation of nature by the distractions of the restaurant and the gaming-table; but he had carried her from one obscure corner of Europe to another, shunning fashionable hotels and crowded watering-places, and displaying an ingenuity in the discovery of the unvisited and the out-of-season that gave their journey an odd resemblance to her melancholy wedding-tour.

She had never for a moment ceased to remember that the Dakota divorce-court was the objective point of this later honeymoon, and her allusions to the fact were as frequent as prudence permitted. Peter seemed in no way disturbed by them. He responded with expressions of increasing tenderness, or the purchase of another piece of jewelry; and though Undine could not remember his ever voluntarily bringing the subject of their marriage he did not shrink from her recurring mention of it. He seemed merely too steeped in present well-being to think of the future, and she ascribed this to the fact that his faculty of enjoyment could not project itself beyond the moment. Her business was to make each of their days so agreeable that when the last came he should be conscious of a void to be bridged over as rapidly as possible and when she thought this point had been reached she packed her trunks and started for Dakota.

The next picture to follow was that of the dull months in the western divorce-town, where, to escape loneliness and avoid comment, she had cast in her lot with Mabel Lipscomb, who had lately arrived there on the same errand.

Undine, at the outset, had been sorry for the friend whose new venture seemed likely to result so much less brilliantly than her own; but compassion had been replaced by irritation as Mabel’s unpruned vulgarities, her enormous encroaching satisfaction with herself and her surroundings, began to pervade every corner of their provisional household. Undine, during the first months of her exile, had been sustained by the fullest confidence in her future. When she had parted from Van Degen she had felt sure he meant to marry her, and the fact that Mrs. Lipscomb was fortified by no similar hope made her easier to bear with. Undine was almost ashamed that the unwooed Mabel should be the witness of her own felicity, and planned to send her off on a trip to Denver when Peter should announce his arrival; but the weeks passed, and Peter did not come. Mabel, on the whole, behaved well in this contingency. Undine, in her first exultation, had confided all her hopes and plans to her friend, but Mabel took no undue advantage of the confidence. She was even tactful in her loud fond clumsy way, with a tact that insistently boomed and buzzed about its victim’s head. But one day she mentioned that she had asked to dinner a gentleman from Little Rock who had come to Dakota with the same object as themselves, and whose acquaintance she had made through her lawyer.

The gentleman from Little Rock came to dine, and within a week Undine understood that Mabel’s future was assured. If Van Degen had been at hand Undine would have smiled with him at poor Mabel’s infatuation and her suitor’s crudeness. But Van Degen was not there. He made no sign, he sent no excuse; he simply continued to absent himself; and it was Undine who, in due course, had to make way for Mrs. Lipscomb’s caller, and sit upstairs with a novel while the drawingroom below was given up to the enacting of an actual love-story.

Even then, even to the end, Undine had to admit that Mabel had behaved “beautifully.” But it is comparatively easy to behave beautifully when one is getting what one wants, and when some one else, who has not always been altogether kind, is not. The net result of Mrs. Lipscomb’s magnanimity was that when, on the day of parting, she drew Undine to her bosom with the hand on which her new engagement-ring blazed, Undine hated her as she hated everything else connected with her vain exile in the wilderness.

XXVI

The next phase in the unrolling vision was the episode of her return to New York. She had gone to the Malibran, to her parents—for it was a moment in her career when she clung passionately to the conformities, and when the fact of being able to say: “I’m here with my father and mother” was worth paying for even in the discomfort of that grim abode. Nevertheless, it was another thorn in her pride that her parents could not—for the meanest of material reasons—transfer themselves at her coming to one of the big Fifth Avenue hotels. When she had suggested it Mr. Spragg had briefly replied that, owing to the heavy expenses of her divorce suit, he couldn’t for the moment afford anything better; and this announcement cast a deeper gloom over the future.

It was not an occasion for being “nervous,” however; she had learned too many hard facts in the last few months to think of having recourse to her youthful methods. And something told her that if she made the attempt it would be useless. Her father and mother seemed much older, seemed tired and defeated, like herself.

Parents and daughter bore their common failure in a common silence, broken only by Mrs. Spragg’s occasional tentative allusions to her grandson. But her anecdotes of Paul left a deeper silence behind them. Undine did not want to talk of her boy. She could forget him when, as she put it, things were “going her way,” but in moments of discouragement the thought of him was an added bitterness, subtly different from her other bitter thoughts, and harder to quiet. It had not occurred to her to try to gain possession of the child. She was vaguely aware that the courts had given her his custody; but she had never seriously thought of asserting this claim. Her parents’ diminished means and her own uncertain future made her regard the care of Paul as an additional burden, and she quieted her scruples by thinking of him as “better off” with Ralph’s family, and of herself as rather touchingly disinterested in putting his welfare before her own. Poor Mrs. Spragg was pining for him, but Undine rejected her artless suggestion that Mrs. Heeny should be sent to “bring him round.” “I wouldn’t ask them a favour for the world—they’re just waiting for a chance to be hateful to me,” she scornfully declared; but it pained her that her boy, should be so near, yet inaccessible, and for the first time she was visited by unwonted questionings as to her share in the misfortunes that had befallen her. She had voluntarily stepped out of her social frame, and the only person on whom she could with any satisfaction have laid the blame was the person to whom her mind now turned with a belated tenderness. It was thus, in fact, that she thought of Ralph. His pride, his reserve, all the secret expressions of his devotion, the tones of his voice, his quiet manner, even his disconcerting irony: these seemed, in contrast to what she had since known, the qualities essential to her happiness. She could console herself only by regarding it as part of her sad lot that poverty and the relentless animosity of his family, should have put an end to so perfect a union: she gradually began to look on herself and Ralph as the victims of dark machinations, and when she mentioned him she spoke forgivingly, and implied that “everything might have been different” if “people” had not “come between” them. She had arrived in New York in midseason, and the dread of seeing familiar faces kept her shut up in her room at the Malibran, reading novels and brooding over possibilities of escape. She tried to avoid the daily papers, but they formed the staple diet of her parents, and now and then she could not help taking one up and turning to the “Society Column.” Its perusal produced the impression that the season must be the gayest New York had ever known. The Harmon B. Driscolls, young Jim and his wife, the Thurber Van Degens, the Chauncey Ellings, and all the other Fifth Avenue potentates, seemed to have their doors perpetually open to a stream of feasters among whom the familiar presences of Grace Beringer, Bertha Shallum, Dicky Bowles and Claud Walsingham Popple came and went with the irritating sameness of the figures in a stage-procession.

Among them also Peter Van Degen presently appeared. He had been on a tour around the world, and Undine could not look at a newspaper without seeing some allusion to his progress. After his return she noticed that his name was usually coupled with his wife’s: he and Clare seemed to be celebrating his home-coming in a series of festivities, and Undine guessed that he had reasons for wishing to keep before the world the evidences of his conjugal accord.

Mrs. Heeny’s clippings supplied her with such items as her own reading missed; and one day the masseuse appeared with a long article from the leading journal of Little Rock, describing the brilliant nuptials of Mabel Lipscomb—now Mrs. Homer Branney—and her departure for “the Coast” in the bridegroom’s private car. This put the last touch to Undine’s irritation, and the next morning she got up earlier than usual, put on her most effective dress, went for a quick walk around the Park, and told her father when she came in that she wanted him to take her to the opera that evening.

Mr. Spragg stared and frowned. “You mean you want me to go round and hire a box for you?”

“Oh, no.” Undine coloured at the infelicitous allusion: besides, she knew now that the smart people who were “musical” went in stalls.

“I only want two good seats. I don’t see why I should stay shut up. I want you to go with me,” she added.

Her father received the latter part of the request without comment: he seemed to have gone beyond surprise. But he appeared that evening at dinner in a creased and loosely fitting dress-suit which he had probably not put on since the last time he had dined with his son-in-law, and he and Undine drove off together, leaving Mrs. Spragg to gaze after them with the pale stare of Hecuba.

Their stalls were in the middle of the house, and around them swept the great curve of boxes at which Undine had so often looked up in the remote Stentorian days. Then all had been one indistinguishable glitter, now the scene was full of familiar details: the house was thronged with people she knew, and every box seemed to contain a parcel of her past. At first she had shrunk from recognition; but gradually, as she perceived that no one noticed her, that she was merely part of the invisible crowd out of range of the exploring opera glasses, she felt a defiant desire to make herself seen. When the performance was over her father wanted to leave the house by the door at which they had entered, but she guided him toward the stockholders’ entrance, and pressed her way among the furred and jewelled ladies waiting for their motors. “Oh, it’s the wrong door—never mind, we’ll walk to the corner and get a cab,” she exclaimed, speaking loudly enough to be overheard. Two or three heads turned, and she met Dicky Bowles’s glance, and returned his laughing bow. The woman talking to him looked around, coloured slightly, and made a barely perceptible motion of her head. Just beyond her, Mrs. Chauncey Elling, plumed and purple, stared, parted her lips, and turned to say something important to young Jim Driscoll, who looked up involuntarily and then squared his shoulders and gazed fixedly at a distant point, as people do at a funeral. Behind them Undine caught sight of Clare Van Degen; she stood alone, and her face was pale and listless. “Shall I go up and speak to her?” Undine wondered. Some intuition told her that, alone of all the women present, Clare might have greeted her kindly; but she hung back, and Mrs. Harmon Driscoll surged by on Popple’s arm. Popple crimsoned, coughed, and signalled despotically to Mrs. Driscoll’s footman. Over his shoulder Undine received a bow from Charles Bowen, and behind Bowen she saw two or three other men she knew, and read in their faces surprise, curiosity, and the wish to show their pleasure at seeing her. But she grasped her father’s arm and drew him out among the entangled motors and vociferating policemen.

Neither she nor Mr. Spragg spoke a word on the way home; but when they reached the Malibran her father followed her up to her room. She had dropped her cloak and stood before the wardrobe mirror studying her reflection when he came up behind her and she saw that he was looking at it too.

“Where did that necklace come from?”

Undine’s neck grew pink under the shining circlet. It was the first time since her return to New York that she had put on a low dress and thus uncovered the string of pearls she always wore. She made no answer, and Mr. Spragg continued: “Did your husband give them to you?”

“RALPH!” She could not restrain a laugh.

“Who did, then?”

Undine remained silent. She really had not thought about the pearls, except in so far as she consciously enjoyed the pleasure of possessing them; and her father, habitually so unobservant, had seemed the last person likely to raise the awkward question of their origin.

“Why—” she began, without knowing what she meant to say.

“I guess you better send ‘em back to the party they belong to,” Mr. Spragg continued, in a voice she did not know.

“They belong to me!” she flamed up. He looked at her as if she had grown suddenly small and insignificant. “You better send ‘em back to Peter Van Degen the first thing tomorrow morning,” he said as he went out of the room. As far as Undine could remember, it was the first time in her life that he had ever ordered her to do anything; and when the door closed on him she had the distinct sense that the question had closed with it, and that she would have to obey. She took the pearls off and threw them from her angrily. The humiliation her father had inflicted on her was merged with the humiliation to which she had subjected herself in going to the opera, and she had never before hated her life as she hated it then.

All night she lay sleepless, wondering miserably what to do; and out of her hatred of her life, and her hatred of Peter Van Degen, there gradually grew a loathing of Van Degen’s pearls. How could she have kept them; how have continued to wear them about her neck! Only her absorption in other cares could have kept her from feeling the humiliation of carrying about with her the price of her shame. Her novel-reading had filled her mind with the vocabulary of outraged virtue, and with pathetic allusions to woman’s frailty, and while she pitied herself she thought her father heroic. She was proud to think that she had such a man to defend her, and rejoiced that it was in her power to express her scorn of Van Degen by sending back his jewels.

But her righteous ardour gradually cooled, and she was left once more to face the dreary problem of the future. Her evening at the opera had shown her the impossibility of remaining in New York. She had neither the skill nor the power to fight the forces of indifference leagued against her: she must get away at once, and try to make a fresh start. But, as usual, the lack of money hampered her. Mr. Spragg could no longer afford to make her the allowance she had intermittently received from him during the first years of her marriage, and since she was now without child or household she could hardly make it a grievance that he had reduced her income. But what he allowed her, even with the addition of her alimony, was absurdly insufficient. Not that she looked far ahead; she had always felt herself predestined to ease and luxury, and the possibility of a future adapted to her present budget did not occur to her. But she desperately wanted enough money to carry her without anxiety through the coming year.

When her breakfast tray was brought in she sent it away untouched and continued to lie in her darkened room. She knew that when she got up she must send back the pearls; but there was no longer any satisfaction in the thought, and she lay listlessly wondering how she could best transmit them to Van Degen.

As she lay there she heard Mrs. Heeny’s voice in the passage. Hitherto she had avoided the masseuse, as she did every one else associated with her past. Mrs. Heeny had behaved with extreme discretion, refraining from all direct allusions to Undine’s misadventure; but her silence was obviously the criticism of a superior mind. Once again Undine had disregarded her injunction to “go slow,” with results that justified the warning. Mrs. Heeny’s very reserve, however, now marked her as a safe adviser; and Undine sprang up and called her in. “My sakes. Undine! You look’s if you’d been setting up all night with a remains!” the masseuse exclaimed in her round rich tones.

Undine, without answering, caught up the pearls and thrust them into Mrs. Heeny’s hands.

“Good land alive!” The masseuse dropped into a chair and let the twist slip through her fat flexible fingers. “Well, you got a fortune right round your neck whenever you wear them, Undine Spragg.”

Undine murmured something indistinguishable. “I want you to take them—” she began.

“Take ‘em? Where to?”

“Why, to—” She was checked by the wondering simplicity of Mrs. Heeny’s stare. The masseuse must know where the pearls had come from, yet it had evidently not occurred to her that Mrs. Marvell was about to ask her to return them to their donor. In the light of Mrs. Heeny’s unclouded gaze the whole episode took on a different aspect, and Undine began to be vaguely astonished at her immediate submission to her father’s will. The pearls were hers, after all!

“To be re-strung?” Mrs. Heeny placidly suggested. “Why, you’d oughter to have it done right here before your eyes, with pearls that are worth what these are.”

As Undine listened, a new thought shaped itself. She could not continue to wear the pearls: the idea had become intolerable. But for the first time she saw what they might be converted into, and what they might rescue her from; and suddenly she brought out: “Do you suppose I could get anything for them?”

“Get anything? Why, what—”

“Anything like what they’re worth, I mean. They cost a lot of money: they came from the biggest place in Paris.” Under Mrs. Heeny’s simplifying eye it was comparatively easy to make these explanations. “I want you to try and sell them for me—I want you to do the best you can with them. I can’t do it myself—but you must swear you’ll never tell a soul,” she pressed on breathlessly.

“Why, you poor child—it ain’t the first time,” said Mrs. Heeny, coiling the pearls in her big palm. “It’s a pity too: they’re such beauties. But you’ll get others,” she added, as the necklace vanished into her bag.

A few days later there appeared from the same receptacle a bundle of banknotes considerable enough to quiet Undine’s last scruples. She no longer understood why she had hesitated. Why should she have thought it necessary to give back the pearls to Van Degen? His obligation to her represented far more than the relatively small sum she had been able to realize on the necklace. She hid the money in her dress, and when Mrs. Heeny had gone on to Mrs. Spragg’s room she drew the packet out, and counting the bills over, murmured to herself: “Now I can get away!”

Her one thought was to return to Europe; but she did not want to go alone. The vision of her solitary figure adrift in the spring mob of transAtlantic pleasure-seekers depressed and mortified her. She would be sure to run across acquaintances, and they would infer that she was in quest of a new opportunity, a fresh start, and would suspect her of trying to use them for the purpose. The thought was repugnant to her newly awakened pride, and she decided that if she went to Europe her father and mother must go with her. The project was a bold one, and when she broached it she had to run the whole gamut of Mr. Spragg’s irony. He wanted to know what she expected to do with him when she got him there; whether she meant to introduce him to “all those old Kings,” how she thought he and her mother would look in court dress, and how she supposed he was going to get on without his New York paper. But Undine had been aware of having what he himself would have called “a pull” over her father since, the day after their visit to the opera, he had taken her aside to ask: “You sent back those pearls?” and she had answered coldly: “Mrs. Heeny’s taken them.”

After a moment of half-bewildered resistance her parents, perhaps secretly flattered by this first expression of her need for them, had yielded to her entreaty, packed their trunks, and stoically set out for the unknown. Neither Mr. Spragg nor his wife had ever before been out of their country; and Undine had not understood, till they stood beside her tongue-tied and helpless on the dock at Cherbourg, the task she had undertaken in uprooting them. Mr. Spragg had never been physically active, but on foreign shores he was seized by a strange restlessness, and a helpless dependence on his daughter. Mrs. Spragg’s long habit of apathy was overcome by her dread of being left alone when her husband and Undine went out, and she delayed and impeded their expeditions by insisting on accompanying them; so that, much as Undine disliked sightseeing, there seemed no alternative between “going round” with her parents and shutting herself up with them in the crowded hotels to which she successively transported them.

The hotels were the only European institutions that really interested Mr. Spragg. He considered them manifestly inferior to those at home; but he was haunted by a statistical curiosity as to their size, their number, their cost and their capacity for housing and feeding the incalculable hordes of his countrymen. He went through galleries, churches and museums in a stolid silence like his daughter’s; but in the hotels he never ceased to enquire and investigate, questioning every one who could speak English, comparing bills, collecting prospectuses and computing the cost of construction and the probable return on the investment. He regarded the nonexistence of the cold-storage system as one more proof of European inferiority, and no longer wondered, in the absence of the room-to-room telephone, that foreigners hadn’t yet mastered the first principles of time-saving.

After a few weeks it became evident to both parents and daughter that their unnatural association could not continue much longer. Mrs. Spragg’s shrinking from everything new and unfamiliar had developed into a kind of settled terror, and Mr. Spragg had begun to be depressed by the incredible number of the hotels and their simply incalculable housing capacity.

“It ain’t that they’re any great shakes in themselves, any one of ‘em; but there’s such a darned lot of ‘em: they’re as thick as mosquitoes, every place you go.” And he began to reckon up, on slips of paper, on the backs of bills and the margins of old newspapers, the number of travellers who could be simultaneously lodged, bathed and boarded on the continent of Europe. “Five hundred bedrooms—three hundred bathrooms—no; three hundred and fifty bathrooms, that one has: that makes, supposing two-thirds of ‘em double up—do you s’pose as many as that do, Undie? That porter at Lucerne told me the Germans slept three in a room—well, call it eight hundred people; and three meals a day per head; no, four meals, with that afternoon tea they take; and the last place we were at—‘way up on that mountain there—why, there were seventy-five hotels in that one spot alone, and all jam full—well, it beats me to know where all the people come from…”

He had gone on in this fashion for what seemed to his daughter an endless length of days; and then suddenly he had roused himself to say: “See here, Undie, I got to go back and make the money to pay for all this.”

There had been no question on the part of any of the three of Undine’s returning with them; and after she had conveyed them to their steamer, and seen their vaguely relieved faces merged in the handkerchief-waving throng along the taffrail, she had returned alone to Paris and made her unsuccessful attempt to enlist the aid of Indiana Rolliver.

XXVII

She was still brooding over this last failure when one afternoon, as she loitered on the hotel terrace, she was approached by a young woman whom she had seen sitting near the wheeled chair of an old lady wearing a crumpled black bonnet under a funny fringed parasol with a jointed handle.

The young woman, who was small, slight and brown, was dressed with a disregard of the fashion which contrasted oddly with the mauve powder on her face and the traces of artificial colour in her dark untidy hair. She looked as if she might have several different personalities, and as if the one of the moment had been hanging up a long time in her wardrobe and been hurriedly taken down as probably good enough for the present occasion.

With her hands in her jacket pockets, and an agreeable smile on her boyish face, she strolled up to Undine and asked, in a pretty variety of Parisian English, if she had the pleasure of speaking to Mrs. Marvell.

On Undine’s assenting, the smile grew more alert and the lady continued: “I think you know my friend Sacha Adelschein?”

No question could have been less welcome to Undine. If there was one point on which she was doggedly and puritanically resolved, it was that no extremes of social adversity should ever again draw her into the group of people among whom Madame Adelschein too conspicuously figured. Since her unsuccessful attempt to win over Indiana by introducing her to that group, Undine had been righteously resolved to remain aloof from it; and she was drawing herself up to her loftiest height of disapproval when the stranger, as if unconscious of it, went on: “Sacha speaks of you so often—she admires you so much.—I think you know also my cousin Chelles,” she added, looking into Undine’s eyes. “I am the Princess Estradina. I’ve come here with my mother for the air.”

The murmur of negation died on Undine’s lips. She found herself grappling with a new social riddle, and such surprises were always stimulating. The name of the untidy-looking young woman she had been about to repel was one of the most eminent in the impregnable quarter beyond the Seine. No one figured more largely in the Parisian chronicle than the Princess Estradina, and no name more impressively headed the list at every marriage, funeral and philanthropic entertainment of the Faubourg Saint Germain than that of her mother, the Duchesse de Dordogne, who must be no other than the old woman sitting in the Bath-chair with the crumpled bonnet and the ridiculous sunshade.

But it was not the appearance of the two ladies that surprised Undine. She knew that social gold does not always glitter, and that the lady she had heard spoken of as Lili Estradina was notoriously careless of the conventions; but that she should boast of her intimacy with Madame Adelschein, and use it as a pretext for naming herself, overthrew all Undine’s hierarchies.

“Yes—it’s hideously dull here, and I’m dying of it. Do come over and speak to my mother. She’s dying of it too; but don’t tell her so, because she hasn’t found it out. There were so many things our mothers never found out,” the Princess rambled on, with her half-mocking half-intimate smile; and in another moment Undine, thrilled at having Mrs. Spragg thus coupled with a Duchess, found herself seated between mother and daughter, and responding by a radiant blush to the elder lady’s amiable opening: “You know my nephew Raymond—he’s your great admirer.”

How had it happened, whither would it lead, how long could it last? The questions raced through Undine’s brain as she sat listening to her new friends—they seemed already too friendly to be called acquaintances!—replying to their enquiries, and trying to think far enough ahead to guess what they would expect her to say, and what tone it would be well to take. She was used to such feats of mental agility, and it was instinctive with her to become, for the moment, the person she thought her interlocutors expected her to be; but she had never had quite so new a part to play at such short notice. She took her cue, however, from the fact that the Princess Estradina, in her mother’s presence, made no farther allusion to her dear friend Sacha, and seemed somehow, though she continued to chat on in the same easy strain, to look differently and throw out different implications. All these shades of demeanour were immediately perceptible to Undine, who tried to adapt herself to them by combining in her manner a mixture of Apex dash and New York dignity; and the result was so successful that when she rose to go the Princess, with a hand on her arm, said almost wistfully: “You’re staying on too? Then do take pity on us! We might go on some trips together; and in the evenings we could make a bridge.”

A new life began for Undine. The Princess, chained her mother’s side, and frankly restive under her filial duty, clung to her new acquaintance with a persistence too flattering to be analyzed. “My dear, I was on the brink of suicide when I saw your name in the visitors’ list,” she explained; and Undine felt like answering that she had nearly reached the same pass when the Princess’s thin little hand had been held out to her. For the moment she was dizzy with the effect of that random gesture. Here she was, at the lowest ebb of her fortunes, miraculously rehabilitated, reinstated, and restored to the old victorious sense of her youth and her power! Her sole graces, her unaided personality, had worked the miracle; how should she not trust in them hereafter?

Aside from her feeling of concrete attainment. Undine was deeply interested in her new friends. The Princess and her mother, in their different ways, were different from any one else she had known. The Princess, who might have been of any age between twenty and forty, had a small triangular face with caressing impudent eyes, a smile like a silent whistle and the gait of a baker’s boy balancing his basket. She wore either baggy shabby clothes like a man’s, or rich draperies that looked as if they had been rained on; and she seemed equally at ease in either style of dress, and carelessly unconscious of both. She was extremely familiar and unblushingly inquisitive, but she never gave Undine the time to ask her any questions or the opportunity to venture on any freedom with her. Nevertheless she did not scruple to talk of her sentimental experiences, and seemed surprised, and rather disappointed, that Undine had so few to relate in return. She playfully accused her beautiful new friend of being cachottiere, and at the sight of Undine’s blush cried out: “Ah, you funny Americans! Why do you all behave as if love were a secret infirmity?”

The old Duchess was even more impressive, because she fitted better into Undine’s preconceived picture of the Faubourg Saint Germain, and was more like the people with whom she pictured the former Nettie Wincher as living in privileged intimacy. The Duchess was, indeed, more amiable and accessible than Undine’s conception of a Duchess, and displayed a curiosity as great as her daughter’s, and much more puerile, concerning her new friend’s history and habits. But through her mild prattle, and in spite of her limited perceptions. Undine felt in her the same clear impenetrable barrier that she ran against occasionally in the Princess; and she was beginning to understand that this barrier represented a number of things about which she herself had yet to learn. She would not have known this a few years earlier, nor would she have seen in the Duchess anything but the ruin of an ugly woman, dressed in clothes that Mrs. Spragg wouldn’t have touched. The Duchess certainly looked like a ruin; but Undine now saw that she looked like the ruin of a castle.

The Princess, who was unofficially separated from her husband, had with her her two little girls. She seemed extremely attached to both—though avowing for the younger a preference she frankly ascribed to the interesting accident of its parentage—and she could not understand that Undine, as to whose domestic difficulties she minutely informed herself, should have consented to leave her child to strangers. “For, to one’s child every one but one’s self is a stranger; and whatever your egarements—” she began, breaking off with a stare when Undine interrupted her to explain that the courts had ascribed all the wrongs in the case to her husband. “But then—but then—” murmured the Princess, turning away from the subject as if checked by too deep an abyss of difference.

The incident had embarrassed Undine, and though she tried to justify herself by allusions to her boy’s dependence on his father’s family, and to the duty of not standing in his way, she saw that she made no impression. “Whatever one’s errors, one’s child belongs to one,” her hearer continued to repeat; and Undine, who was frequently scandalized by the Princess’s conversation, now found herself in the odd position of having to set a watch upon her own in order not to scandalize the Princess.

Each day, nevertheless, strengthened her hold on her new friends. After her first flush of triumph she began indeed to suspect that she had been a slight disappointment to the Princess, had not completely justified the hopes raised by the doubtful honour of being one of Sacha Adelschein’s intimates. Undine guessed that the Princess had expected to find her more amusing, “queerer,” more startling in speech and conduct. Though by instinct she was none of these things, she was eager to go as far as was expected; but she felt that her audacities were on lines too normal to be interesting, and that the Princess thought her rather school-girlish and old-fashioned. Still, they had in common their youth, their boredom, their high spirits and their hunger for amusement; and Undine was making the most of these ties when one day, coming back from a trip to Monte-Carlo with the Princess, she was brought up short by the sight of a lady—evidently a new arrival—who was seated in an attitude of respectful intimacy beside the old Duchess’s chair. Undine, advancing unheard over the fine gravel of the garden path, recognized at a glance the Marquise de Trezac’s drooping nose and disdainful back, and at the same moment heard her say: “—And her husband?”

“Her husband? But she’s an American—she’s divorced,” the Duchess replied, as if she were merely stating the same fact in two different ways; and Undine stopped short with a pang of apprehension.

The Princess came up behind her. “Who’s the solemn person with Mamma? Ah, that old bore of a Trezac!” She dropped her long eyeglass with a laugh. “Well, she’ll be useful—she’ll stick to Mamma like a leech and we shall get away oftener. Come, let’s go and be charming to her.”

She approached Madame de Trezac effusively, and after an interchange of exclamations Undine heard her say “You know my friend Mrs. Marvell? No? How odd! Where do you manage to hide yourself, chere Madame? Undine, here’s a compatriot who hasn’t the pleasure—”

“I’m such a hermit, dear Mrs. Marvell—the Princess shows me what I miss,” the Marquise de Trezac murmured, rising to give her hand to Undine, and speaking in a voice so different from that of the supercilious Miss Wincher that only her facial angle and the droop of her nose linked her to the hated vision of Potash Springs.

Undine felt herself dancing on a flood-tide of security. For the first time the memory of Potash Springs became a thing to smile at, and with the Princess’s arm through hers she shone back triumphantly on Madame de Trezac, who seemed to have grown suddenly obsequious and insignificant, as though the waving of the Princess’s wand had stripped her of all her false advantages.

But upstairs, in her own room. Undine’s courage fell. Madame de Trezac had been civil, effusive even, because for the moment she had been taken off her guard by finding Mrs. Marvell on terms of intimacy with the Princess Estradina and her mother. But the force of facts would reassert itself. Far from continuing to see Undine through her French friends’ eyes she would probably invite them to view her compatriot through the searching lens of her own ampler information. “The old hypocrite—she’ll tell them everything,” Undine murmured, wincing at the recollection of the dentist’s assistant from Deposit, and staring miserably at her reflection in the dressing-table mirror. Of what use were youth and grace and good looks, if one drop of poison distilled from the envy of a narrow-minded woman was enough to paralyze them? Of course Madame de Trezac knew and remembered, and, secure in her own impregnable position, would never rest till she had driven out the intruder.

XXVIII

“What do you say to Nice tomorrow, dearest?” the Princess suggested a few evenings later as she followed Undine upstairs after a languid evening at bridge with the Duchess and Madame de Trezac.

Halfway down the passage she stopped to open a door and, putting her finger to her lip, signed to Undine to enter. In the taper-lit dimness stood two small white beds, each surmounted by a crucifix and a palm branch, and each containing a small brown sleeping child with a mop of hair and a curiously finished little face. As the Princess stood gazing on their innocent slumbers she seemed for a moment like a third little girl scarcely bigger and browner than the others; and the smile with which she watched them was as clear as theirs. “Ah, si seulement je pouvais choisir leurs amants!” she sighed as she turned away.

“—Nice tomorrow,” she repeated, as she and Undine walked on to their rooms with linked arms. “We may as well make hay while the Trezac shines. She bores Mamma frightfully, but Mamma won’t admit it because they belong to the same oeuvres. Shall it be the eleven train, dear? We can lunch at the Royal and look in the shops—we may meet somebody amusing. Anyhow, it’s better than staying here!”

Undine was sure the trip to Nice would be delightful. Their previous expeditions had shown her the Princess’s faculty for organizing such adventures. At Monte-Carlo, a few days before, they had run across two or three amusing but unassorted people, and the Princess, having fused them in a jolly lunch, had followed it up by a bout at baccarat, and, finally hunting down an eminent composer who had just arrived to rehearse a new production, had insisted on his asking the party to tea, and treating them to fragments of his opera.

A few days earlier, Undine’s hope of renewing such pleasures would have been clouded by the dread of leaving Madame de Trezac alone with the Duchess. But she had no longer any fear of Madame de Trezac. She had discovered that her old rival of Potash Springs was in actual dread of her disfavour, and nervously anxious to conciliate her, and the discovery gave her such a sense of the heights she had scaled, and the security of her footing, that all her troubled past began to seem like the result of some providential “design,” and vague impulses of piety stirred in her as she and the Princess whirled toward Nice through the blue and gold glitter of the morning.

They wandered about the lively streets, they gazed into the beguiling shops, the Princess tried on hats and Undine bought them, and they lunched at the Royal on all sorts of succulent dishes prepared under the headwaiter’s special supervision. But as they were savouring their “double” coffee and liqueurs, and Undine was wondering what her companion would devise for the afternoon, the Princess clapped her hands together and cried out: “Dearest, I’d forgotten! I must desert you.”

She explained that she’d promised the Duchess to look up a friend who was ill—a poor wretch who’d been sent to Cimiez for her lungs—and that she must rush off at once, and would be back as soon as possible—well, if not in an hour, then in two at latest. She was full of compunction, but she knew Undine would forgive her, and find something amusing to fill up the time: she advised her to go back and buy the black hat with the osprey, and try on the crepe de Chine they’d thought so smart: for any one as good-looking as herself the woman would probably alter it for nothing; and they could meet again at the Palace Tea-Rooms at four. She whirled away in a cloud of explanations, and Undine, left alone, sat down on the Promenade des Anglais. She did not believe a word the Princess had said. She had seen in a flash why she was being left, and why the plan had not been divulged to her beforehand; and she quivered with resentment and humiliation. “That’s what she’s wanted me for…that’s why she made up to me. She’s trying it to-day, and after this it’ll happen regularly…she’ll drag me over here every day or two…at least she thinks she will!”

A sincere disgust was Undine’s uppermost sensation. She was as much ashamed as Mrs. Spragg might have been at finding herself used to screen a clandestine adventure.

“I’ll let her see… I’ll make her understand,” she repeated angrily; and for a moment she was half-disposed to drive to the station and take the first train back. But the sense of her precarious situation withheld her; and presently, with bitterness in her heart, she got up and began to stroll toward the shops.

To show that she was not a dupe, she arrived at the designated meeting-place nearly an hour later than the time appointed; but when she entered the Tea-Rooms the Princess was nowhere to be seen. The rooms were crowded, and Undine was guided toward a small inner apartment where isolated couples were absorbing refreshments in an atmosphere of intimacy that made it seem incongruous to be alone. She glanced about for a face she knew, but none was visible, and she was just giving up the search when she beheld Elmer Moffatt shouldering his way through the crowd.

The sight was so surprising that she sat gazing with unconscious fixity at the round black head and glossy reddish face which kept appearing and disappearing through the intervening jungle of aigrettes. It was long since she had either heard of Moffatt or thought about him, and now, in her loneliness and exasperation, she took comfort in the sight of his confident capable face, and felt a longing to hear his voice and unbosom her woes to him. She had half risen to attract his attention when she saw him turn back and make way for a companion, who was cautiously steering her huge feathered hat between the tea-tables. The woman was of the vulgarest type; everything about her was cheap and gaudy. But Moffatt was obviously elated: he stood aside with a flourish to usher her in, and as he followed he shot out a pink shirt-cuff with jewelled links, and gave his moustache a gallant twist. Undine felt an unreasoning irritation: she was vexed with him both for not being alone and for being so vulgarly accompanied. As the couple seated themselves she caught Moffatt’s glance and saw him redden to the edge of his white forehead; but he elaborately avoided her eye—he evidently wanted her to see him do it—and proceeded to minister to his companion’s wants with an air of experienced gallantry.

The incident, trifling as it was, filled up the measure of Undine’s bitterness. She thought Moffatt pitiably ridiculous, and she hated him for showing himself in such a light at that particular moment. Her mind turned back to her own grievance, and she was just saying to herself that nothing on earth should prevent her letting the Princess know what she thought of her, when the lady in question at last appeared. She came hurriedly forward and behind her Undine perceived the figure of a slight quietly dressed man, as to whom her immediate impression was that he made every one else in the room look as common as Moffatt. An instant later the colour had flown to her face and her hand was in Raymond de Chelles, while the Princess, murmuring: “Cimiez’s such a long way off; but you WILL forgive me?” looked into her eyes with a smile that added: “See how I pay for what I get!”

Her first glance showed Undine how glad Raymond de Chelles was to see her. Since their last meeting his admiration for her seemed not only to have increased but to have acquired a different character. Undine, at an earlier stage in her career, might not have known exactly what the difference signified; but it was as clear to her now as if the Princess had said—what her beaming eyes seemed, in fact, to convey—“I’m only too glad to do my cousin the same kind of turn you’re doing me.”

But Undine’s increased experience, if it had made her more vigilant, had also given her a clearer measure of her power. She saw at once that Chelles, in seeking to meet her again, was not in quest of a mere passing adventure. He was evidently deeply drawn to her, and her present situation, if it made it natural to regard her as more accessible, had not altered the nature of his feeling. She saw and weighed all this in the first five minutes during which, over tea and muffins, the Princess descanted on her luck in happening to run across her cousin, and Chelles, his enchanted eyes on Undine, expressed his sense of his good fortune. He was staying, it appeared, with friends at Beaulieu, and had run over to Nice that afternoon by the merest chance: he added that, having just learned of his aunt’s presence in the neighbourhood, he had already planned to present his homage to her.

“Oh, don’t come to us—we’re too dull!” the Princess exclaimed. “Let us run over occasionally and call on you: we’re dying for a pretext, aren’t we?” she added, smiling at Undine.

The latter smiled back vaguely, and looked across the room. Moffatt, looking flushed and foolish, was just pushing back his chair. To carry off his embarrassment he put an additional touch of importance; and as he swaggered out behind his companion, Undine said to herself, with a shiver: “If he’d been alone they would have found me taking tea with him.”

Undine, during the ensuing weeks, returned several times to Nice with the Princess; but, to the latter’s surprise, she absolutely refused to have Raymond de Chelles included in their luncheon-parties, or even apprised in advance of their expeditions.

The Princess, always impatient of unnecessary dissimulation, had not attempted to keep up the feint of the interesting invalid at Cimiez. She confessed to Undine that she was drawn to Nice by the presence there of the person without whom, for the moment, she found life intolerable, and whom she could not well receive under the same roof with her little girls and her mother. She appealed to Undine’s sisterly heart to feel for her in her difficulty, and implied that—as her conduct had already proved—she would always be ready to render her friend a like service. It was at this point that Undine checked her by a decided word. “I understand your position, and I’m very sorry for you, of course,” she began (the Princess stared at the “sorry”). “Your secret’s perfectly safe with me, and I’ll do anything I can for you…but if I go to Nice with you again you must promise not to ask your cousin to meet us.”

The Princess’s face expressed the most genuine astonishment. “Oh, my dear, do forgive me if I’ve been stupid! He admires you so tremendously; and I thought—”

“You’ll do as I ask, please—won’t you?” Undine went on, ignoring the interruption and looking straight at her under level brows; and the Princess, with a shrug, merely murmured: “What a pity! I fancied you liked him.”

XXIX

The early spring found Undine once more in Paris.

She had every reason to be satisfied with the result of the course she had pursued since she had pronounced her ultimatum on the subject of Raymond de Chelles. She had continued to remain on the best of terms with the Princess, to rise in the estimation of the old Duchess, and to measure the rapidity of her ascent in the upward gaze of Madame de Trezac; and she had given Chelles to understand that, if he wished to renew their acquaintance, he must do so in the shelter of his venerable aunt’s protection.

To the Princess she was careful to make her attitude equally clear. “I like your cousin very much—he’s delightful, and if I’m in Paris this spring I hope I shall see a great deal of him. But I know how easy it is for a woman in my position to get talked about—and I have my little boy to consider.”

Nevertheless, whenever Chelles came over from Beaulieu to spend a day with his aunt and cousin—an excursion he not infrequently repeated—Undine was at no pains to conceal her pleasure. Nor was there anything calculated in her attitude. Chelles seemed to her more charming than ever, and the warmth of his wooing was in flattering contrast to the cool reserve of his manners. At last she felt herself alive and young again, and it became a joy to look in her glass and to try on her new hats and dresses…

The only menace ahead was the usual one of the want of money. While she had travelled with her parents she had been at relatively small expense, and since their return to America Mr. Spragg had sent her allowance regularly; yet almost all the money she had received for the pearls was already gone, and she knew her Paris season would be far more expensive than the quiet weeks on the Riviera.

Meanwhile the sense of reviving popularity, and the charm of Chelles’ devotion, had almost effaced the ugly memories of failure, and refurbished that image of herself in other minds which was her only notion of self-seeing. Under the guidance of Madame de Trezac she had found a prettily furnished apartment in a not too inaccessible quarter, and in its light bright drawingroom she sat one June afternoon listening, with all the forbearance of which she was capable, to the counsels of her newly-acquired guide.

“Everything but marriage—” Madame de Trezac was repeating, her long head slightly tilted, her features wearing the rapt look of an adept reciting a hallowed formula.

Raymond de Chelles had not been mentioned by either of the ladies, and the former Miss Wincher was merely imparting to her young friend one of the fundamental dogmas of her social creed; but Undine was conscious that the air between them vibrated with an unspoken name. She made no immediate answer, but her glance, passing by Madame de Trezac’s dull countenance, sought her own reflection in the mirror behind her visitor’s chair. A beam of spring sunlight touched the living masses of her hair and made the face beneath as radiant as a girl’s. Undine smiled faintly at the promise her own eyes gave her, and then turned them back to her friend. “What can such women know about anything?” she thought compassionately.

“There’s everything against it,” Madame de Trezac continued in a tone of patient exposition. She seemed to be doing her best to make the matter clear. “In the first place, between people in society a religious marriage is necessary; and, since the Church doesn’t recognize divorce, that’s obviously out of the question. In France, a man of position who goes through the form of civil marriage with a divorced woman is simply ruining himself and her. They might much better—from her point of view as well as his—be ‘friends,’ as it’s called over here: such arrangements are understood and allowed for. But when a Frenchman marries he wants to marry as his people always have. He knows there are traditions he can’t fight against—and in his heart he’s glad there are.”

“Oh, I know: they’ve so much religious feeling. I admire that in them: their religion’s so beautiful.” Undine looked thoughtfully at her visitor. “I suppose even money—a great deal of money—wouldn’t make the least bit of difference?”

“None whatever, except to make matters worse,” Madame de Trezac decisively rejoined. She returned Undine’s look with something of Miss Wincher’s contemptuous authority. “But,” she added, softening to a smile, “between ourselves—I can say it, since we’re neither of us children—a woman with tact, who’s not in a position to remarry, will find society extremely indulgent… provided, of course, she keeps up appearances…”

Undine turned to her with the frown of a startled Diana. “We don’t look at things that way out at Apex,” she said coldly; and the blood rose in Madame de Trezac’s sallow cheek.

“Oh, my dear, it’s so refreshing to hear you talk like that! Personally, of course, I’ve never quite got used to the French view—”

“I hope no American woman ever does,” said Undine.

She had been in Paris for about two months when this conversation took place, and in spite of her reviving self-confidence she was beginning to recognize the strength of the forces opposed to her. It had taken a long time to convince her that even money could not prevail against them; and, in the intervals of expressing her admiration for the Catholic creed, she now had violent reactions of militant Protestantism, during which she talked of the tyranny of Rome and recalled school stories of immoral Popes and persecuting Jesuits.

Meanwhile her demeanour to Chelles was that of the incorruptible but fearless American woman, who cannot even conceive of love outside of marriage, but is ready to give her devoted friendship to the man on whom, in happier circumstances, she might have bestowed her hand. This attitude was provocative of many scenes, during which her suitor’s unfailing powers of expression—his gift of looking and saying all the desperate and devoted things a pretty woman likes to think she inspires—gave Undine the thrilling sense of breathing the very air of French fiction. But she was aware that too prolonged tension of these cords usually ends in their snapping, and that Chelles’ patience was probably in inverse ratio to his ardour.

When Madame de Trezac had left her these thoughts remained in her mind. She understood exactly what each of her new friends wanted of her. The Princess, who was fond of her cousin, and had the French sense of family solidarity, would have liked to see Chelles happy in what seemed to her the only imaginable way. Madame de Trezac would have liked to do what she could to second the Princess’s efforts in this or any other line; and even the old Duchess—though piously desirous of seeing her favourite nephew married—would have thought it not only natural but inevitable that, while awaiting that happy event, he should try to induce an amiable young woman to mitigate the drawbacks of celibacy. Meanwhile, they might one and all weary of her if Chelles did; and a persistent rejection of his suit would probably imperil her scarcely-gained footing among his friends. All this was clear to her, yet it did not shake her resolve. She was determined to give up Chelles unless he was willing to marry her; and the thought of her renunciation moved her to a kind of wistful melancholy.

In this mood her mind reverted to a letter she had just received from her mother. Mrs. Spragg wrote more fully than usual, and the unwonted flow of her pen had been occasioned by an event for which she had long yearned. For months she had pined for a sight of her grandson, had tried to screw up her courage to write and ask permission to visit him, and, finally breaking through her sedentary habits, had begun to haunt the neighbourhood of Washington Square, with the result that one afternoon she had had the luck to meet the little boy coming out of the house with his nurse. She had spoken to him, and he had remembered her and called her “Granny”; and the next day she had received a note from Mrs. Fairford saying that Ralph would be glad to send Paul to see her. Mrs. Spragg enlarged on the delights of the visit and the growing beauty and cleverness of her grandson. She described to Undine exactly how Paul was dressed, how he looked and what he said, and told her how he had examined everything in the room, and, finally coming upon his mother’s photograph, had asked who the lady was; and, on being told, had wanted to know if she was a very long way off, and when Granny thought she would come back.

As Undine re-read her mother’s pages, she felt an unusual tightness in her throat and two tears rose to her eyes. It was dreadful that her little boy should be growing up far away from her, perhaps dressed in clothes she would have hated; and wicked and unnatural that when he saw her picture he should have to be told who she was. “If I could only meet some good man who would give me a home and be a father to him,” she thought—and the tears overflowed and ran down.

Even as they fell, the door was thrown open to admit Raymond de Chelles, and the consciousness of the moisture still glistening on her cheeks perhaps strengthened her resolve to resist him, and thus made her more imperiously to be desired. Certain it is that on that day her suitor first alluded to a possibility which Madame de Trezac had prudently refrained from suggesting, there fell upon Undine’s attentive ears the magic phrase “annulment of marriage.”

Her alert intelligence immediately set to work in this new direction; but almost at the same moment she became aware of a subtle change of tone in the Princess and her mother, a change reflected in the corresponding decline of Madame de Trezac’s cordiality. Undine, since her arrival in Paris, had necessarily been less in the Princess’s company, but when they met she had found her as friendly as ever. It was manifestly not a failing of the Princess’s to forget past favours, and though increasingly absorbed by the demands of town life she treated her new friend with the same affectionate frankness, and Undine was given frequent opportunities to enlarge her Parisian acquaintance, not only in the Princess’s intimate circle but in the majestic drawingrooms of the Hotel de Dordogne. Now, however, there was a perceptible decline in these signs of hospitality, and Undine, on calling one day on the Duchess, noticed that her appearance sent a visible flutter of discomfort through the circle about her hostess’s chair. Two or three of the ladies present looked away from the newcomer and at each other, and several of them seemed spontaneously to encircle without approaching her, while another—grey-haired, elderly and slightly frightened—with an “Adieu, ma bonne tante” to the Duchess, was hastily aided in her retreat down the long line of old gilded rooms.

The incident was too mute and rapid to have been noticeable had it not been followed by the Duchess’s resuming her conversation with the ladies nearest her as though Undine had just gone out of the room instead of entering it. The sense of having been thus rendered invisible filled Undine with a vehement desire to make herself seen, and an equally strong sense that all attempts to do so would be vain; and when, a few minutes later, she issued from the portals of the Hotel de Dordogne it was with the fixed resolve not to enter them again till she had had an explanation with the Princess.

She was spared the trouble of seeking one by the arrival, early the next morning, of Madame de Trezac, who, entering almost with the breakfast tray, mysteriously asked to be allowed to communicate something of importance.

“You’ll understand, I know, the Princess’s not coming herself—” Madame de Trezac began, sitting up very straight on the edge of the armchair over which Undine’s lace dressinggown hung.

“If there’s anything she wants to say to me, I don’t,” Undine answered, leaning back among her rosy pillows, and reflecting compassionately that the face opposite her was just the colour of the café au lait she was pouring out.

“There are things that are…that might seem too pointed…if one said them one’s self,” Madame de Trezac continued. “Our dear Lili’s so good-natured… she so hates to do anything unfriendly; but she naturally thinks first of her mother…”

“Her mother? What’s the matter with her mother?”

“I told her I knew you didn’t understand. I was sure you’d take it in good part…”

Undine raised herself on her elbow. “What did Lili tell you to tell me?”

“Oh, not to TELL you…simply to ask if, just for the present, you’d mind avoiding the Duchess’s Thursdays …calling on any other day, that is.”

“Any other day? She’s not at home on any other. Do you mean she doesn’t want me to call?”

“Well—not while the Marquise de Chelles is in Paris. She’s the Duchess’s favourite niece—and of course they all hang together. That kind of family feeling is something you naturally don’t—”

Undine had a sudden glimpse of hidden intricacies.

“That was Raymond de Chelles’ mother I saw there yesterday? The one they hurried out when I came in?”

“It seems she was very much upset. She somehow heard your name.”

“Why shouldn’t she have heard my name? And why in the world should it upset her?”

Madame de Trezac heaved a hesitating sigh. “Isn’t it better to be frank? She thinks she has reason to feel badly—they all do.”

“To feel badly? Because her son wants to marry me?”

“Of course they know that’s impossible.” Madame de Trezac smiled compassionately. “But they’re afraid of your spoiling his other chances.”

Undine paused a moment before answering, “It won’t be impossible when my marriage is annulled,” she said.

The effect of this statement was less electrifying than she had hoped. Her visitor simply broke into a laugh. “My dear child! Your marriage annulled? Who can have put such a mad idea into your head?”

Undine’s gaze followed the pattern she was tracing with a lustrous nail on her embroidered bedspread. “Raymond himself,” she let fall.

This time there was no mistaking the effect she produced. Madame de Trezac, with a murmured “Oh,” sat gazing before her as if she had lost the thread of her argument; and it was only after a considerable interval that she recovered it sufficiently to exclaim: “They’ll never hear of it—absolutely never!”

“But they can’t prevent it, can they?”

“They can prevent its being of any use to you.”

“I see,” Undine pensively assented.

She knew the tone she had taken was virtually a declaration of war; but she was in a mood when the act of defiance, apart from its strategic value, was a satisfaction in itself. Moreover, if she could not gain her end without a fight it was better that the battle should be engaged while Raymond’s ardour was at its height. To provoke immediate hostilities she sent for him the same afternoon, and related, quietly and without comment, the incident of her visit to the Duchess, and the mission with which Madame de Trezac had been charged. In the circumstances, she went on to explain, it was manifestly impossible that she should continue to receive his visits; and she met his wrathful comments on his relatives by the gently but firmly expressed resolve not to be the cause of any disagreement between himself and his family.

XXX

A few days after her decisive conversation with Raymond de Chelles, Undine, emerging from the doors of the Nouveau Luxe, where she had been to call on the newly-arrived Mrs. Homer Branney, once more found herself face to face with Elmer Moffatt.

This time there was no mistaking his eagerness to be recognized. He stopped short as they met, and she read such pleasure in his eyes that she too stopped, holding out her hand.

“I’m glad you’re going to speak to me,” she said, and Moffatt reddened at the allusion.

“Well, I very nearly didn’t. I didn’t know you. You look about as old as you did when I first landed at Apex—remember?”

He turned back and began to walk at her side in the direction of the Champs Elysees.

“Say—this is all right!” he exclaimed; and she saw that his glance had left her and was ranging across the wide silvery square ahead of them to the congregated domes and spires beyond the river.

“Do you like Paris?” she asked, wondering what theatres he had been to.

“It beats everything.” He seemed to be breathing in deeply the impression of fountains, sculpture, leafy’ avenues and long-drawn architectural distances fading into the afternoon haze.

“I suppose you’ve been to that old church over there?” he went on, his gold-topped stick pointing toward the towers of Notre Dame.

“Oh, of course; when I used to sightsee. Have you never been to Paris before?”

“No, this is my first look-round. I came across in March.”

“In March?” she echoed inattentively. It never occurred to her that other people’s lives went on when they were out of her range of vision, and she tried in vain to remember what she had last heard of Moffatt. “Wasn’t that a bad time to leave Wall Street?”

“Well, so-so. Fact is, I was played out: needed a change.” Nothing in his robust mien confirmed the statement, and he did not seem inclined to develop it. “I presume you’re settled here now?” he went on. “I saw by the papers—”

“Yes,” she interrupted; adding, after a moment: “It was all a mistake from the first.”

“Well, I never thought he was your form,” said Moffatt.

His eyes had come back to her, and the look in them struck her as something she might use to her advantage; but the next moment he had glanced away with a furrowed brow, and she felt she had not wholly fixed his attention.

“I live at the other end of Paris. Why not come back and have tea with me?” she suggested, half moved by a desire to know more of his affairs, and half by the thought that a talk with him might help to shed some light on hers.

In the open taxi-cab he seemed to recover his sense of well-being, and leaned back, his hands on the knob of his stick, with the air of a man pleasantly aware of his privileges. “This Paris is a thundering good place,” he repeated once or twice as they rolled on through the crush and glitter of the afternoon; and when they had descended at Undine’s door, and he stood in her drawingroom, and looked out on the horse-chestnut trees rounding their green domes under the balcony, his satisfaction culminated in the comment: “I guess this lays out West End Avenue!”

His eyes met Undine’s with their old twinkle, and their expression encouraged her to murmur: “Of course there are times when I’m very lonely.”

She sat down behind the tea-table, and he stood at a little distance, watching her pull off her gloves with a queer comic twitch of his elastic mouth. “Well, I guess it’s only when you want to be,” he said, grasping a lyre-backed chair by its gilt cords, and sitting down astride of it, his light grey trousers stretching too tightly over his plump thighs. Undine was perfectly aware that he was a vulgar over-dressed man, with a red crease of fat above his collar and an impudent swaggering eye; yet she liked to see him there, and was conscious that he stirred the fibres of a self she had forgotten but had not ceased to understand.

She had fancied her avowal of loneliness might call forth some sentimental phrase; but though Moffatt was clearly pleased to be with her she saw that she was not the centre of his thoughts, and the discovery irritated her.

“I don’t suppose YOU’VE known what it is to be lonely since you’ve been in Europe?” she continued as she held out his tea-cup.

“Oh,” he said jocosely, “I don’t always go round with a guide”; and she rejoined on the same note: “Then perhaps I shall see something of you.”

“Why, there’s nothing would suit me better; but the fact is, I’m probably sailing next week.”

“Oh, are you? I’m sorry.” There was nothing feigned in her regret.

“Anything I can do for you across the pond?”

She hesitated. “There’s something you can do for me right off.”

He looked at her more attentively, as if his practised eve had passed through the surface of her beauty to what might be going on behind it. “Do you want my blessing again?” he asked with sudden irony.

Undine opened her eyes with a trustful look. “Yes—I do.”

“Well—I’ll be damned!” said Moffatt gaily.

“You’ve always been so awfully nice,” she began; and he leaned back, grasping both sides of the chair-back, and shaking it a little with his laugh.

He kept the same attitude while she proceeded to unfold her case, listening to her with the air of sober concentration that his frivolous face took on at any serious demand on his attention. When she had ended he kept the same look during an interval of silent pondering. “Is it the fellow who was over at Nice with you that day?”

She looked at him with surprise. “How did you know?”

“Why, I liked his looks,” said Moffatt simply. He got up and strolled toward the window. On the way he stopped before a table covered with showy trifles, and after looking at them for a moment singled out a dim old brown and golden book which Chelles had given her. He examined it lingeringly, as though it touched the spring of some choked-up sensibility for which he had no language. “Say—” he began: it was the usual prelude to his enthusiasms; but he laid the book down and turned back.

“Then you think if you had the cash you could fix it up all right with the Pope?”

Her heart began to beat. She remembered that he had once put a job in Ralph’s way, and had let her understand that he had done it partly for her sake.

“Well,” he continued, relapsing into hyperbole, “I wish I could send the old gentleman my cheque tomorrow morning: but the fact is I’m high and dry.” He looked at her with a sudden odd intensity. “If I WASN’T, I dunno but what—” The phrase was lost in his familiar whistle. “That’s an awfully fetching way you do your hair,” he said. It was a disappointment to Undine to hear that his affairs were not prospering, for she knew that in his world “pull” and solvency were closely related, and that such support as she had hoped he might give her would be contingent on his own situation. But she had again a fleeting sense of his mysterious power of accomplishing things in the teeth of adversity; and she answered: “What I want is your advice.”

He turned away and wandered across the room, his hands in his pockets. On her ornate writing desk he saw a photograph of Paul, bright-curled and sturdy-legged, in a manly reefer, and bent over it with a murmur of approval. “Say—what a fellow! Got him with you?”

Undine coloured. “No—” she began; and seeing his look of surprise, she embarked on her usual explanation. “I can’t tell you how I miss him,” she ended, with a ring of truth that carried conviction to her own ears if not to Moffatt’s.

“Why don’t you get him back, then?”

“Why, I—”

Moffatt had picked up the frame and was looking at the photograph more closely. “Pants!” he chuckled. “I declare!”

He turned back to Undine. “Who DOES he belong to, anyhow?”

“Belong to?”

“Who got him when you were divorced? Did you?”

“Oh, I got everything,” she said, her instinct of self-defense on the alert.

“So I thought.” He stood before her, stoutly planted on his short legs, and speaking with an aggressive energy. “Well, I know what I’d do if he was mine.”

“If he was yours?”

“And you tried to get him away from me. Fight you to a finish! If it cost me down to my last dollar I would.”

The conversation seemed to be wandering from the point, and she answered, with a touch of impatience: “It wouldn’t cost you anything like that. I haven’t got a dollar to fight back with.”

“Well, you ain’t got to fight. Your decree gave him to you, didn’t it? Why don’t you send right over and get him? That’s what I’d do if I was you.”

Undine looked up. “But I’m awfully poor; I can’t afford to have him here.”

“You couldn’t, up to now; but now you’re going to get married. You’re going to be able to give him a home and a father’s care—and the foreign languages. That’s what I’d say if I was you…His father takes considerable stock in him, don’t he?”

She coloured, a denial on her lips; but she could not shape it. “We’re both awfully fond of him, of course… His father’d never give him up!”

“Just so.” Moffatt’s face had grown as sharp as glass. “You’ve got the Marvells running. All you’ve got to do’s to sit tight and wait for their cheque.” He dropped back to his equestrian seat on the lyre-backed chair.

Undine stood up and moved uneasily toward the window. She seemed to see her little boy as though he were in the room with her; she did not understand how she could have lived so long without him…She stood for a long time without speaking, feeling behind her the concentrated irony of Moffatt’s gaze.

“You couldn’t lend me the money—manage to borrow it for me, I mean?” she finally turned back to ask. He laughed. “If I could manage to borrow any money at this particular minute—well, I’d have to lend every dollar of it to Elmer Moffatt, Esquire. I’m stone-broke, if you want to know. And wanted for an Investigation too. That’s why I’m over here improving my mind.”

“Why, I thought you were going home next week?”

He grinned. “I am, because I’ve found out there’s a party wants me to stay away worse than the courts want me back. Making the trip just for my private satisfaction—there won’t be any money in it, I’m afraid.”

Leaden disappointment descended on Undine. She had felt almost sure of Moffatt’s helping her, and for an instant she wondered if some long-smouldering jealousy had flamed up under its cold cinders. But another look at his face denied her this solace; and his evident indifference was the last blow to her pride. The twinge it gave her prompted her to ask: “Don’t you ever mean to get married?”

Moffatt gave her a quick look. “Why, I shouldn’t wonder—one of these days. Millionaires always collect something; but I’ve got to collect my millions first.”

He spoke coolly and half-humorously, and before he had ended she had lost all interest in his reply. He seemed aware of the fact, for he stood up and held out his hand. “Well, so long, Mrs. Marvell. It’s been uncommonly pleasant to see you; and you’d better think over what I’ve said.”

She laid her hand sadly in his. “You’ve never had a child,” she replied.

XXXI

Nearly two years had passed since Ralph Marvell, waking from his long sleep in the hot summer light of Washington Square, had found that the face of life was changed for him.

In the interval he had gradually adapted himself to the new order of things; but the months of adaptation had been a time of such darkness and confusion that, from the vantage-ground of his recovered lucidity, he could not yet distinguish the stages by which he had worked his way out; and even now his footing was not secure.

His first effort had been to readjust his values—to take an inventory of them, and reclassify them, so that one at least might be made to appear as important as those he had lost; otherwise there could be no reason why he should go on living. He applied himself doggedly to this attempt; but whenever he thought he had found a reason that his mind could rest in, it gave way under him, and the old struggle for a foothold began again. His two objects in life were his boy and his book. The boy was incomparably the stronger argument, yet the less serviceable in filling the void. Ralph felt his son all the while, and all through his other feelings; but he could not think about him actively and continuously, could not forever exercise his eager empty dissatisfied mind on the relatively simple problem of clothing, educating and amusing a little boy of six. Yet Paul’s existence was the all-sufficient reason for his own; and he turned again, with a kind of cold fervour, to his abandoned literary dream. Material needs obliged him to go on with his regular business; but, the day’s work over, he was possessed of a leisure as bare and as blank as an unfurnished house, yet that was at least his own to furnish as he pleased.

Meanwhile he was beginning to show a presentable face to the world, and to be once more treated like a man in whose case no one is particularly interested. His men friends ceased to say: “Hallo, old chap, I never saw you looking fitter!” and elderly ladies no longer told him they were sure he kept too much to himself, and urged him to drop in any afternoon for a quiet talk. People left him to his sorrow as a man is left to an incurable habit, an unfortunate tie: they ignored it, or looked over its head if they happened to catch a glimpse of it at his elbow.

These glimpses were given to them more and more rarely. The smothered springs of life were bubbling up in Ralph, and there were days when he was glad to wake and see the sun in his window, and when he began to plan his book, and to fancy that the planning really interested him. He could even maintain the delusion for several days—for intervals each time appreciably longer—before it shrivelled up again in a scorching blast of disenchantment. The worst of it was that he could never tell when these hot gusts of anguish would overtake him. They came sometimes just when he felt most secure, when he was saying to himself: “After all, things are really worth while—” sometimes even when he was sitting with Clare Van Degen, listening to her voice, watching her hands, and turning over in his mind the opening chapters of his book.

“You ought to write”; they had one and all said it to him from the first; and he fancied he might have begun sooner if he had not been urged on by their watchful fondness. Everybody wanted him to write—everybody had decided that he ought to, that he would, that he must be persuaded to; and the incessant imperceptible pressure of encouragement—the assumption of those about him that because it would be good for him to write he must naturally be able to—acted on his restive nerves as a stronger deterrent than disapproval.

Even Clare had fallen into the same mistake; and one day, as he sat talking with her on the verandah of Laura Fairford’s house on the Sound—where they now most frequently met—Ralph had half-impatiently rejoined: “Oh, if you think it’s literature I need—!”

Instantly he had seen her face change, and the speaking hands tremble on her knee. But she achieved the feat of not answering him, or turning her steady eyes from the dancing midsummer water at the foot of Laura’s lawn. Ralph leaned a little nearer, and for an instant his hand imagined the flutter of hers. But instead of clasping it he drew back, and rising from his chair wandered away to the other end of the verandah…No, he didn’t feel as Clare felt. If he loved her—as he sometimes thought he did—it was not in the same way. He had a great tenderness for her, he was more nearly happy with her than with any one else; he liked to sit and talk with her, and watch her face and her hands, and he wished there were some way—some different way—of letting her know it; but he could not conceive that tenderness and desire could ever again be one for him: such a notion as that seemed part of the monstrous sentimental muddle on which his life had gone aground.

“I shall write—of course I shall write some day,” he said, turning back to his seat. “I’ve had a novel in the back of my head for years; and now’s the time to pull it out.”

He hardly knew what he was saying; but before the end of the sentence he saw that Clare had understood what he meant to convey, and henceforth he felt committed to letting her talk to him as much as she pleased about his book. He himself, in consequence, took to thinking about it more consecutively; and just as his friends ceased to urge him to write, he sat down in earnest to begin.

The vision that had come to him had no likeness to any of his earlier imaginings. Two or three subjects had haunted him, pleading for expression, during the first years of his marriage; but these now seemed either too lyrical or too tragic. He no longer saw life on the heroic scale: he wanted to do something in which men should look no bigger than the insects they were. He contrived in the course of time to reduce one of his old subjects to these dimensions, and after nights of brooding he made a dash at it, and wrote an opening chapter that struck him as not too bad. In the exhilaration of this first attempt he spent some pleasant evenings revising and polishing his work; and gradually a feeling of authority and importance developed in him. In the morning, when he woke, instead of his habitual sense of lassitude, he felt an eagerness to be up and doing, and a conviction that his individual task was a necessary part of the world’s machinery. He kept his secret with the beginner’s deadly fear of losing his hold on his half-real creations if he let in any outer light on them; but he went about with a more assured step, shrank less from meeting his friends, and even began to dine out again, and to laugh at some of the jokes he heard.

Laura Fairford, to get Paul away from town, had gone early to the country; and Ralph, who went down to her every Saturday, usually found Clare Van Degen there. Since his divorce he had never entered his cousin’s pinnacled palace; and Clare had never asked him why he stayed away. This mutual silence had been their sole allusion to Van Degen’s share in the catastrophe, though Ralph had spoken frankly of its other aspects. They talked, however, most often of impersonal subjects—books, pictures, plays, or whatever the world that interested them was doing—and she showed no desire to draw him back to his own affairs. She was again staying late in town—to have a pretext, as he guessed, for coming down on Sundays to the Fairfords’—and they often made the trip together in her motor; but he had not yet spoken to her of having begun his book. One May evening, however, as they sat alone in the verandah, he suddenly told her that he was writing. As he spoke his heart beat like a boy’s; but once the words were out they gave him a feeling of self-confidence, and he began to sketch his plan, and then to go into its details. Clare listened devoutly, her eyes burning on him through the dusk like the stars deepening above the garden; and when she got up to go in he followed her with a new sense of reassurance.

The dinner that evening was unusually pleasant. Charles Bowen, just back from his usual spring travels, had come straight down to his friends from the steamer; and the fund of impressions he brought with him gave Ralph a desire to be up and wandering. And why not—when the book was done? He smiled across the table at Clare.

“Next summer you’ll have to charter a yacht, and take us all off to the Aegean. We can’t have Charles condescending to us about the out-of-the-way places he’s been seeing.”

Was it really he who was speaking, and his cousin who was sending him back her dusky smile? Well—why not, again? The seasons renewed themselves, and he too was putting out a new growth. “My book—my book—my book,” kept repeating itself under all his thoughts, as Undine’s name had once perpetually murmured there. That night as he went up to bed he said to himself that he was actually ceasing to think about his wife…

As he passed Laura’s door she called him in, and put her arms about him.

“You look so well, dear!”

“But why shouldn’t I?” he answered gaily, as if ridiculing the fancy that he had ever looked otherwise. Paul was sleeping behind the next door, and the sense of the boy’s nearness gave him a warmer glow. His little world was rounding itself out again, and once more he felt safe and at peace in its circle.

His sister looked as if she had something more to say; but she merely kissed him good night, and he went up whistling to his room. The next morning he was to take a walk with Clare, and while he lounged about the drawingroom, waiting for her to come down, a servant came in with the Sunday papers. Ralph picked one up, and was absently unfolding it when his eye fell on his own name: a sight he had been spared since the last echoes of his divorce had subsided. His impulse was to fling the paper down, to hurl it as far from him as he could; but a grim fascination tightened his hold and drew his eyes back to the hated headline.

NEW YORK BEAUTY WEDS FRENCH NOBLEMAN MRS. UNDINE MARVELL CONFIDENT POPE WILL ANNUL PREVIOUS MARRIAGE MRS. MARVELL TALKS ABOUT HER CASE

There it was before him in all its long-drawn horror—an “interview”—an “interview” of Undine’s about her coming marriage! Ah, she talked about her case indeed! Her confidences filled the greater part of a column, and the only detail she seemed to have omitted was the name of her future husband, who was referred to by herself as “my fiancé” and by the interviewer as “the Count” or “a prominent scion of the French nobility.”

Ralph heard Laura’s step behind him. He threw the paper aside and their eyes met.

“Is this what you wanted to tell me last night?”

“Last night?—Is it in the papers?”

“Who told you? Bowen? What else has he heard?”

“Oh, Ralph, what does it matter—what can it matter?”

“Who’s the man? Did he tell you that?” Ralph insisted. He saw her growing agitation. “Why can’t you answer? Is it any one I know?”

“He was told in Paris it was his friend Raymond de Chelles.”

Ralph laughed, and his laugh sounded in his own ears like an echo of the dreary mirth with which he had filled Mr. Spragg’s office the day he had learned that Undine intended to divorce him. But now his wrath was seasoned with a wholesome irony. The fact of his wife’s having reached another stage in her ascent fell into its place as a part of the huge human buffoonery.

“Besides,” Laura went on, “it’s all perfect nonsense, of course. How in the world can she have her marriage annulled?”

Ralph pondered: this put the matter in another light. “With a great deal of money I suppose she might.”

“Well, she certainly won’t get that from Chelles. He’s far from rich, Charles tells me.” Laura waited, watching him, before she risked: “That’s what convinces me she wouldn’t have him if she could.”

Ralph shrugged. “There may be other inducements. But she won’t be able to manage it.” He heard himself speaking quite collectedly. Had Undine at last lost her power of wounding him?

Clare came in, dressed for their walk, and under Laura’s anxious eyes he picked up the newspaper and held it out with a careless: “Look at this!”

His cousin’s glance flew down the column, and he saw the tremor of her lashes as she read. Then she lifted her head. “But you’ll be free!” Her face was as vivid as a flower.