The Custom of the Country

Introduction copyright © 2019 by Jia Tolentino

Notes copyright © 2001 by Penguin Random House LLC

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Wharton, Edith, 1862–1937.

The custom of the country / Edith Wharton. / with an introduction by Jia Tolentino and notes by Benjamin Dreyer.

p. cm. —ISBN 978-0-375-75807-2

Ebook ISBN 978-0-593-13310-1

1. Americans—France—Fiction. 2. Remarried people—Fiction. 3. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 4. Divorced women—Fiction. 5. Paris (France)—Fiction.

6. Upper class—Fiction. I. Title. II. Series. PS3545.H16 C8 2001

813'.52—dc21 2001032962

Ebook ISBN 9780593133101

modernlibrary.com

randomhousebooks.com

Cover design: Rachel Ake

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CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Book One

Book Two

Book Three

Book Four

Book Five

Notes

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

JIA TOLENTINO

For my money, there’s no better literary antiheroine in existence than Undine Spragg, the dazzling monster with rose-gold hair, creamy skin, and a gaping spiritual maw that could swallow New York City. Her circuitous journey from Midwestern rube to ruby-drenched new-money empress is so sinister, so mesmerizing, and so incredibly funny—in large part because of the alchemical mix of sympathy and disdain that animates Edith Wharton’s language in The Custom of the Country, allowing her to match Undine’s savagery with plenty of her own.

We meet Undine as a desperate newcomer, two years sprung from the fictional town of Apex. A string of abortive attempts at romance and sophistication have landed her, and her parents—nineteenth-century ATM machines who fearfully attempt to tranquilize their beastly daughter with diversion and finery—at a hotel called the Stentorian, in what they call the Looey suites. This is the fanciest setting to which their unconnected souls can lay claim. Undine and her mother are reliant on Mrs. Heeny, their masseuse and manicurist, to decipher the codes and hierarchies of aristocratic New York. A dinner invite from Mrs. Fairford brings the deepest sort of existential consternation that Undine can muster: she’d read in the newspaper that pigeon-blood notepaper with white ink is the fashion, but Mrs. Fairford used plain white paper. Perhaps, Undine worries, the Fairfords are not the entrée into the society pages that she seeks!

Undine was fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative, explains Wharton, in the first of many passages that, in Twitter parlance, might best be described as the author dragging Undine to hell. Wharton goes on: Undine wanted to surprise every one by her dash and originality, but she could not help modeling herself on the last person she met, and the confusion of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation when she had to choose between two courses. The main thing Undine has going for her is that she’s gorgeous—her looks as vivid, and almost as crude as the electric lights that blaze in her arriviste hotel room. She might have been some fabled creature whose home was in a beam of light, Wharton writes. (She is, in fact, such a creature. Undine is at peace only when illuminated by attention: without it, the reader quickly comes to understand, our heroine would turn to dust.) Undine hangs out in front of her mirror, glittering at herself, picturing an imaginary audience: her incessant movements, Wharton notes, are the result of her belief that it was the correct thing to be animated in society, and noise and restlessness were her only notion of vivacity. She then gets Mrs. Heeny to verify the precise social standing of Mrs. Fairford, and bullies her father into buying her a new dress.

It’s with this delectable mismatch—between Undine’s shallow, ridiculous perceptions and her unbelievably savvy instincts—that her ascent begins. It doesn’t matter that she’s tacky enough to find the Fairford home shabby, with its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and ferns and wood fire where (she thinks) elaborate gilding and orchids and a gas log ought to be. It doesn’t matter that she not only hasn’t heard of any of the new art exhibitions that are talked about at dinner, but has barely heard of the existence of art exhibitions—or that she thinks Phèdre is pronounced fade, or that the only book she has read lately is called When the Kissing Had to Stop. Undine gets the essentials: that to be beautiful, for a woman, is to be seen, which is to be wanted, which is to be given the ability to exploit an economic system. She knows that she can parlay one material commitment from a man into another, as if she were at a medieval marketplace exchanging salt for bread. And, crucially, Undine’s insight into the machinery she manipulates is largely unconscious. As she often told her parents, Wharton writes, all she sought for was improvement; she honestly wanted the best.

It’s not long before Undine attracts the attention of Ralph Marvell, a gentleman from an old New York family that has retained its vaunted reputation but little of its wealth. Ralph underestimates Undine in a way that literally proves fatal. He makes a classic mistake: having been trained to imagine that white women are naturally innocent, he sees the purest virtue in Undine’s beauty. He imagines society careering up to make a mouthful of her, and himself whirling down on his winged horse. Without him, Ralph thinks, Undine would be easy prey to the powers of folly. (It’s with this thought that Ralph makes himself into easy prey.) After Ralph proposes, Wharton takes another opportunity to fillet her protagonist, even as she further addicts us to Undine’s magnificent, incorrigible selfishness. She "was in love, of course, Undine thinks. It was pleasant, when she looked across the table, to meet Ralph’s gray eyes, with that new look in them, and to feel that she had kindled it, but it was only part of her larger pleasure in the general homage to her beauty, in the sensations of interest and curiosity excited by everything about her—including the family heirlooms—…which were to be hers too, after all!"

On the honeymoon, Ralph discovers that his attention has lost its power to trigger Undine’s graces. He has already been conquered and committed; his ardor has already been converted into what little money it can bring her. Intimacy, for Ralph’s new wife, is now a pretext for lapsing out of her flirtatious wiles into a total absence of expression. Still, with this beautiful creature at his side, his senses are invigorated. He dreams of being a writer, and one day experiences an epiphany in the Italian countryside. He rushes to Undine and exclaims, It’s the meaning of life that I’ve found, and it’s you, dearest, you who’ve given it to me! In turn, she starts crying. She cannot begin to process what Ralph is saying, as her brain cannot admit the idea that another person might possess an inner life, or nurture goals that differ from her own goals, which begin and end with Undine Spragg being wealthy and admired and happy. Undine tells Ralph that she’s tired of Italy. She wants to go to Switzerland, where it’s fun.

As a rule, it’s not great for women to have to live in a culture that funnels money and power through men. In her best-known novels, The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth, Wharton demonstrates this at length through Ellen Olenska and Lily Bart, whose choices and trajectories are curtailed by their inability to (respectively) get a divorce or remain solvent without the right sort of patriarchal patronage. The thrill of The Custom of the Country is that, in this story, it’s bad for men—for anyone, really—to have to live in a culture with Undine. Such is her obscene power, her ability to capitalize on the idea that women are secondary creatures who must be coddled and protected like dolls. In a conversation between Ralph’s friend Charles Bowen and his wife, Wharton delivers the novel’s effective thesis: that the average American looks down on his wife, and that women, broadly speaking, will not be interested in the world of commerce and ideas if the world of commerce and ideas excludes women, and that, for many a wife at the turn of the twentieth century, money and motors and clothes are simply the big bribe she’s paid for keeping out of some man’s way! Undine is the monstrously perfect result of the system: the completest proof of its triumph, Charles argues, adding that Ralph, in this case, is the victim. He’s right. In this novel, the tables turn.

Wharton’s portrait of Undine is so acute that it frequently flickers across time, into the contemporary. Every hour was packed with what she would have called life, Wharton writes. Undine’s conception of enjoyment was publicity, promiscuity—the band, the banners, the crowd, the close contact of covetous impulses, and the sense of walking among them in cool security. At a dinner party, she shines with the revolving brilliancy that collective approval always struck from her. Undine’s life is organized around maintaining her beauty, showing off her carefully dressed figure, gaining as wide and prominent an audience of admirers as possible, and increasing the net worth that allows her to do the first three things to her satisfaction. Her world is sorted into people who are assets and people who are impediments and people who, being neither, effectively do not exist. This is an awful and embarrassing way to live, and yet, more than a century after The Custom of the Country was published, Undine’s habits, given a superficial makeover, could be rebranded not just as aspirational but feminist. She’d learned how to defend her life story as that of a woman going after what she wants and getting it—and what could be more progressive than that? This pitch would be total bullshit, but plenty of people would believe it. Our twenty-first-century Undine would have a million followers on Instagram. She’d be a Page Six legend. We would give her what Wharton understood that women like Undine want above everything—the satisfaction of knowing that others are watching her every move.

—

JIA TOLENTINO is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Raised in Texas, she studied at the University of Virginia before serving in Kyrgyzstan in the Peace Corps and receiving her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. She was a contributing editor at The Hairpin and the deputy editor at Jezebel, and her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Grantland, and Pitchfork, among others. She lives in Brooklyn.

BOOK ONE

1

"Undine Spragg¹—how can you? her mother wailed, raising a prematurely wrinkled hand heavy with rings to defend the note which a languid bell-boy" had just brought in.

But her defense was as feeble as her protest, and she continued to smile on her visitor while Miss Spragg, with a turn of her quick young fingers, possessed herself of the missive and withdrew to the window to read it.

I guess it’s meant for me, she merely threw over her shoulder at her mother.

"Did you ever, Mrs. Heeny?" Mrs. Spragg murmured with deprecating pride.

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

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

Mrs. Spragg and her visitor were enthroned in two heavy gilt armchairs in one of the private drawing rooms of the Hotel Stentorian.² The Spragg rooms were known as one of the Looey suites,³ and the drawing room walls, above their wainscoting of highly varnished mahogany, were hung with salmon-pink damask and adorned with oval portraits of Marie Antoinette and the Princess de Lamballe.⁴ In the center of the florid carpet a gilt table with a top of Mexican onyx sustained a palm in a gilt basket tied with a pink bow. But for this ornament, and a copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles⁵ which lay beside it, the room showed no traces of human use, and Mrs. Spragg herself wore as complete an air of detachment as if she had been a wax figure in a show-window. Her attire was fashionable enough to justify such a post, and her pale soft-cheeked face, with puffy eyelids and drooping mouth, suggested a partially melted wax figure which had run to double-chin.

Mrs. Heeny, in comparison, had a reassuring look of solidity and reality. The planting of her firm black bulk in its chair, and the grasp of her broad red hands on the gilt arms, bespoke an organized and self-reliant activity, accounted for by the fact that Mrs. Heeny was a society manicure and masseuse. Toward Mrs. Spragg and her daughter she filled the double role of manipulator and friend; and it was in the latter capacity that, her day’s task ended, she had dropped in for a moment to cheer up the lonely ladies of the Stentorian.

The young girl whose form had won Mrs. Heeny’s professional commendation suddenly shifted its lovely lines as she turned back from the window.

Here—you can have it after all, she said, crumpling the note and tossing it with a contemptuous gesture into her mother’s lap.

Why—isn’t it from Mr. Popple? Mrs. Spragg exclaimed unguardedly.

No—it isn’t. What made you think I thought it was? snapped her daughter; but the next instant she added, with an outbreak of childish disappointment: It’s only from Mr. Marvell’s sister—at least she says she’s his sister.

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

Mrs. Heeny’s small blue eyes shot out sparks of curiosity. Marvell—what Marvell is that?

The girl explained languidly: A little fellow—I think Mr. Popple said his name was Ralph; while her mother continued: Undine met them both last night at that party downstairs. And from something Mr. Popple said to her about going to one of the new plays, she thought—

How on earth do you know what I thought? Undine flashed back, her gray eyes darting warnings at her mother under their straight black brows.

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

What Popple? Claud Walsingham Popple—the portrait painter?⁶

Yes—I suppose so. He said he’d like to paint me. Mabel Lipscomb introduced him. I don’t care if I never see him again, the girl said, bathed in angry pink.

Do you know him, Mrs. Heeny? Mrs. Spragg inquired.

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

Undine Spragg, at the word, swept round on the speaker with one of the quick turns that revealed her youthful flexibility. She was always doubling and twisting on herself, and every movement she made seemed to start at the nape of her neck, just below the lifted roll of reddish-gold hair, and flow without a break through her whole slim length to the tips of her fingers and the points of her slender restless feet.

"Why, do you know the Marvells? Are they stylish?" she asked.

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

Why, Undine Spragg, I’ve told you all about them time and again! His mother was a Dagonet. They live with old Urban Dagonet down in Washington Square.⁷

To Mrs. Spragg this conveyed even less than to her daughter. ’Way down there? Why do they live with somebody else? Haven’t they got the means to have a home of their own?

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

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

"As swell? Why, Claud Walsingham Popple ain’t in the same class with him!"

The girl was upon her mother with a spring, snatching and smoothing out the crumpled note.

Laura Fairford—is that the sister’s name?

Mrs. Henley Fairford; yes. What does she write about?

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

"She says she wants me to dine with her next Wednesday. Isn’t it queer? Why does she want me? She’s never seen me! Her tone implied that she had long been accustomed to being wanted" by those who had.

Mrs. Heeny laughed. "He saw you, didn’t he?"

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

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

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

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

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

Mercy, no! Married ladies.

But are there never any gentlemen present? pursued Mrs. Spragg, feeling that if this were the case Undine would certainly be disappointed.

"Present where? At their dinners? Of course—Mrs. Fairford gives the smartest little dinners in town. There was an account of one she gave last week in this morning’s Town Talk:⁸ I guess it’s right here among my clippings. Mrs. Heeny, swooping down on her bag, drew from it a handful of newspaper cuttings, which she spread on her ample lap and proceeded to sort with a moistened forefinger. Here, she said, holding one of the slips at arm’s length; and throwing back her head she read, in a slow unpunctuated chant: ‘Mrs. Henley Fairford gave another of her natty little dinners last Wednesday as usual it was smart small and exclusive and there was much gnashing of teeth among the left-outs as Madame Olga Loukowska gave some of her new steppe dances after dinner’—that’s the French for new dance steps," Mrs. Heeny concluded, thrusting the documents back into her bag.

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

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

The ladies’ faces drooped again, and the masseuse went on promptly: But they’re glad enough to have her in the big houses!—Why, yes, I know her, she said, addressing herself to Undine. "I mass’d her for a sprained ankle a couple of years ago. She’s got a lovely manner, but no conversation. Some of my patients converse exquisitely," Mrs. Heeny added with discrimination.

Undine was brooding over the note. "It is written to mother—Mrs. Abner E. Spragg—I never saw anything so funny! ‘Will you allow your daughter to dine with me?’ Allow! Is Mrs. Fairford peculiar?"

No—you are, said Mrs. Heeny bluntly. Don’t you know it’s the thing in the best society to pretend that girls can’t do anything without their mothers’ permission? You just remember that, Undine. You mustn’t accept invitations from gentlemen without you say you’ve got to ask your mother first.

Mercy! But how’ll mother know what to say?

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

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

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

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

Mrs. Heeny looked at her hostess with friendly compassion. She was well aware that she was the only bright spot on Mrs. Spragg’s horizon. Since the Spraggs, some two years previously, had moved from Apex City⁹ to New York, they had made little progress in establishing relations with their new environment; and when, about four months earlier, Mrs. Spragg’s doctor had called in Mrs. Heeny to minister professionally to his patient, he had done more for her spirit than for her body. Mrs. Heeny had had such cases before: she knew the rich helpless family, stranded in lonely splendor in a sumptuous West Side hotel, with a father compelled to seek a semblance of social life at the hotel bar, and a mother deprived of even this contact with her kind, and reduced to illness by boredom and inactivity. Poor Mrs. Spragg had done her own washing in her youth, but since her rising fortunes had made this occupation unsuitable she had sunk into the relative inertia which the ladies of Apex City regarded as one of the prerogatives of affluence. At Apex, however, she had belonged to a social club, and, until they moved to the Mealey House,¹⁰ had been kept busy by the incessant struggle with domestic cares; whereas New York seemed to offer no field for any form of lady-like activity. She therefore took her exercise vicariously, with Mrs. Heeny’s help; and Mrs. Heeny knew how to manipulate her imagination as well as her muscles. It was Mrs. Heeny who peopled the solitude of the long ghostly days with lively anecdotes of the Van Degens, the Driscolls, the Chauncey Ellings and the other social potentates whose least doings Mrs. Spragg and Undine had followed from afar in the Apex papers, and who had come to seem so much more remote since only the width of the Central Park divided mother and daughter from their Olympian portals.

Mrs. Spragg had no ambition for herself—she seemed to have transferred her whole personality to her child—but she was passionately resolved that Undine should have what she wanted, and she sometimes fancied that Mrs. Heeny, who crossed those sacred thresholds so familiarly, might some day gain admission for Undine.

Well—I’ll stay a little mite longer if you want; and supposing I was to rub up your nails while we’re talking? It’ll be more sociable, the masseuse suggested, lifting her bag to the table and covering its shiny onyx surface with bottles and polishers.

Mrs. Spragg consentingly slipped the rings from her small mottled hands. It was soothing to feel herself in Mrs. Heeny’s grasp, and though she knew the attention would cost her three dollars she was secure in the sense that Abner wouldn’t mind. It had been clear to Mrs. Spragg, ever since their rather precipitate departure from Apex City, that Abner was resolved not to mind—resolved at any cost to see through the New York adventure. It seemed likely now that the cost would be considerable. They had lived in New York for two years without any social benefit to their daughter; and it was of course for that purpose that they had come. If, at the time, there had been other and more pressing reasons, they were such as Mrs. Spragg and her husband never touched on, even in the gilded privacy of their bedroom at the Stentorian; and so completely had silence closed in on the subject that to Mrs. Spragg it had become non-existent: she really believed that, as Abner put it, they had left Apex because Undine was too big for the place.

She seemed as yet—poor child!—too small for New York: actually imperceptible to its heedless multitudes; and her mother trembled for the day when her invisibility should be borne in on her. Mrs. Spragg did not mind the long delay for herself—she had stores of lymphatic patience. But she had noticed lately that Undine was beginning to be nervous, and there was nothing that Undine’s parents dreaded so much as her being nervous. Mrs. Spragg’s maternal apprehensions unconsciously escaped in her next words.

I do hope she’ll quiet down now, she murmured, feeling quieter herself as her hand sank into Mrs. Heeny’s roomy palm.

Who’s that? Undine?

Yes. She seemed so set on that Mr. Popple’s coming round. From the way he acted last night she thought he’d be sure to come round this morning. She’s so lonesome, poor child—I can’t say as I blame her.

Oh, he’ll come round. Things don’t happen as quick as that in New York, said Mrs. Heeny, driving her nail-polisher cheeringly.

Mrs. Spragg sighed again. They don’t appear to. They say New Yorkers are always in a hurry; but I can’t say as they’ve hurried much to make our acquaintance.

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

"Oh, that’s so—that’s so!" Mrs. Spragg exclaimed, with a tragic emphasis that made the masseuse glance up at her.

Of course it’s so. And it’s more so in New York than anywhere. The wrong set’s like fly-paper: once you’re in it you can pull and pull, but you’ll never get out of it again.

Undine’s mother heaved another and more helpless sigh. "I wish you’d tell Undine that, Mrs. Heeny."

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

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

Mr. Spragg came in silently, setting his high hat down on the center-table, and laying his overcoat across one of the gilt chairs. He was tallish, gray-bearded and somewhat stooping, with the slack figure of the sedentary man who would be stout if he were not dyspeptic; and his cautious gray eyes with pouch-like underlids had straight black brows like his daughter’s. His thin hair was worn a little too long over his coat collar, and a Masonic emblem dangled from the heavy gold chain which crossed his crumpled black waistcoat.

He stood still in the middle of the room, casting a slow pioneering glance about its gilded void; then he said gently: Well, mother?

Mrs. Spragg remained seated, but her eyes dwelt on him affectionately.

Undine’s been asked out to a dinner-party; and Mrs. Heeny says it’s to one of the first families. It’s the sister of one of the gentlemen that Mabel Lipscomb introduced her to last night.

There was a mild triumph in her tone, for it was owing to her insistence and Undine’s that Mr. Spragg had been induced to give up the house they had bought in West End Avenue, and move with his family to the Stentorian. Undine had early decided that they could not hope to get on while they kept house—all the fashionable people she knew either boarded or lived in hotels. Mrs. Spragg was easily induced to take the same view, but Mr. Spragg had resisted, being at the moment unable either to sell his house or to let it as advantageously as he had hoped. After the move was made it seemed for a time as though he had been right, and the first social steps would be as difficult to make in a hotel as in one’s own house; and Mrs. Spragg was therefore eager to have him know that Undine really owed her first invitation to a meeting under the roof of the Stentorian.

You see we were right to come here, Abner, she added, and he absently rejoined: I guess you two always manage to be right.

But his face remained unsmiling, and instead of seating himself and lighting his cigar, as he usually did before dinner, he took two or three aimless turns about the room, and then paused in front of his wife.

What’s the matter—anything wrong down town? she asked, her eyes reflecting his anxiety.

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

He shook his head. N-no. Nothing worse than what I can see to, if you and Undine will go steady for a while. He paused and looked across the room at his daughter’s door. Where is she—out?

I guess she’s in her room, going over her dresses with that French maid. I don’t know as she’s got anything fit to wear to that dinner, Mrs. Spragg added in a tentative murmur.

Mr. Spragg smiled at last. "Well—I guess she will have," he said prophetically.

He glanced again at his daughter’s door, as if to make sure of its being shut; then, standing close before his wife, he lowered his voice to say: I saw Elmer Moffatt down town today.

Oh, Abner! A wave of almost physical apprehension passed over Mrs. Spragg. Her jeweled hands trembled in her black brocade lap, and the pulpy curves of her face collapsed as if it were a pricked balloon.

Oh, Abner, she moaned again, her eyes also on her daughter’s door.

Mr. Spragg’s black eyebrows gathered in an angry frown, but it was evident that his anger was not against his wife.

What’s the good of Oh Abner-ing? Elmer Moffatt’s nothing to us—no more’n if we never laid eyes on him.

No—I know it; but what’s he doing here? Did you speak to him? she faltered.

He slipped his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. No—I guess Elmer and I are pretty well talked out.

Mrs. Spragg took up her moan. Don’t you tell her you saw him, Abner.

I’ll do as you say; but she may meet him herself.

"Oh, I guess not—not in this new set she’s going with! Don’t tell her anyhow."

He turned away, feeling for one of the cigars which he always carried loose in his pocket; and his wife, rising, stole after him, and laid her hand on his arm.

He can’t do anything to her, can he?

Do anything to her? He swung about furiously. I’d like to see him touch her—that’s all!

2

Undine’s white and gold bedroom, with sea-green panels and old rose carpet, looked along Seventy-second Street toward the leafless tree-tops of the Central Park.

She went to the window, and drawing back its many layers of lace gazed eastward down the long brown-stone perspective. Beyond the Park lay Fifth Avenue—and Fifth Avenue was where she wanted to be!

She turned back into the room, and going to her writing-table laid Mrs. Fairford’s note before her, and began to study it minutely. She had read in the Boudoir Chat¹ of one of the Sunday papers that the smartest women were using the new pigeon-blood notepaper with white ink; and rather against her mother’s advice she had ordered a large supply, with her monogram in silver. It was a disappointment, therefore, to find that Mrs. Fairford wrote on the old-fashioned white sheet, without even a monogram—simply her address and telephone number. It gave Undine rather a poor opinion of Mrs. Fairford’s social standing, and for a moment she thought with considerable satisfaction of answering the note on her pigeon-blood paper. Then she remembered Mrs. Heeny’s emphatic commendation of Mrs. Fairford, and her pen wavered. What if white paper were really newer than pigeon-blood? It might be more stylish, anyhow. Well, she didn’t care if Mrs. Fairford didn’t like red paper—she did! And she wasn’t going to truckle to any woman who lived in a small house down beyond Park Avenue…

Undine was fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative. She wanted to surprise every one by her dash and originality, but she could not help modeling herself on the last person she met, and the confusion of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation when she had to choose between two courses. She hesitated a moment longer, and then took from the drawer a plain sheet with the hotel address.

It was amusing to write the note in her mother’s name—she giggled as she formed the phrase I shall be happy to permit my daughter to take dinner with you (take dinner seemed more elegant than Mrs. Fairford’s dine)—but when she came to the signature she was met by a new difficulty. Mrs. Fairford had signed herself Laura Fairford—just as one schoolgirl would write to another. But could this be a proper model for Mrs. Spragg? Undine could not tolerate the thought of her mother’s abasing herself to a denizen of regions beyond Park Avenue, and she resolutely formed the signature: Sincerely, Mrs. Abner E. Spragg. Then uncertainty overcame her, and she re-wrote her note and copied Mrs. Fairford’s formula: Yours sincerely, Leota B. Spragg. But this struck her as an odd juxtaposition of formality and freedom, and she made a third attempt: Yours with love, Leota B. Spragg. This, however, seemed excessive, as the ladies had never met; and after several other experiments she finally decided on a compromise, and ended the note: Yours sincerely, Mrs. Leota B. Spragg. That might be conventional, Undine reflected, but it was certainly correct.

This point settled, she flung open her door, calling imperiously down the passage: Céleste! and adding, as the French maid appeared: I want to look over all my dinner-dresses.

Considering the extent of Miss Spragg’s wardrobe her dinner-dresses were not many. She had ordered a number the year before but, vexed at her lack of use for them, had tossed them over impatiently to the maid. Since then, indeed, she and Mrs. Spragg had succumbed to the abstract pleasure of buying two or three more, simply because they were too exquisite and Undine looked too lovely in them; but she had grown tired of these also—tired of seeing them hang unworn in her wardrobe, like so many derisive points of interrogation. And now, as Céleste spread them out on the bed, they seemed disgustingly commonplace, and as familiar as if she had danced them to shreds. Nevertheless, she yielded to the maid’s persuasions and tried them on.

The first and second did not gain by prolonged inspection: they looked old-fashioned already. It’s something about the sleeves, Undine grumbled as she threw them aside.

The third was certainly the prettiest; but then it was the one she had worn at the hotel dance the night before, and the impossibility of wearing it again within the week was too obvious for discussion. Yet she enjoyed looking at herself in it, for it reminded her of her sparkling passages with Claud Walsingham Popple, and her quieter but more fruitful talk with his little friend—the young man she had hardly noticed.

You can go, Céleste—I’ll take off the dress myself, she said: and when Céleste had passed out, laden with discarded finery, Undine bolted her door, dragged the tall pier-glass forward and, rummaging in a drawer for fan and gloves, swept to a seat before the mirror with the air of a lady arriving at an evening party. Céleste, before leaving, had drawn down the blinds and turned on the electric light, and the white and gold room, with its blazing wall-brackets, formed a sufficiently brilliant background to carry out the illusion. So untempered a glare would have been destructive to all half-tones and subtleties of modeling; but Undine’s beauty was as vivid, and almost as crude, as the brightness suffusing it. Her black brows, her reddish-tawny hair and the pure red and white of her complexion defied the searching decomposing radiance: she might have been some fabled creature whose home was in a beam of light.

Undine, as a child, had taken but a lukewarm interest in the diversions of her playmates. Even in the early days when she had lived with her parents in a ragged outskirt of Apex, and hung on the fence with Indiana Frusk, the freckled daughter of the plumber across the way, she had cared little for dolls or skipping-ropes, and still less for the riotous games in which the loud Indiana played Atalanta² to all the boyhood of the quarter. Already Undine’s chief delight was to dress up in her mother’s Sunday skirt and play lady before the wardrobe mirror. The taste had outlasted childhood, and she still practiced the same secret pantomime, gliding in, settling her skirts, swaying her fan, moving her lips in soundless talk and laughter; but lately she had shrunk from everything that reminded her of her baffled social yearnings. Now, however, she could yield without afterthought to the joy of dramatizing her beauty. Within a few days she would be enacting the scene she was now mimicking; and it amused her to see in advance just what impression she would produce on Mrs. Fairford’s guests.

For a while she carried on her chat with an imaginary circle of admirers, twisting this way and that, fanning, fidgeting, twitching at her draperies, as she did in real life when people were noticing her. Her incessant movements were not the result of shyness: she thought it the correct thing to be animated in society, and noise and restlessness were her only notion of vivacity. She therefore watched herself approvingly, admiring the light on her hair, the flash of teeth between her smiling lips, the pure shadows of her throat and shoulders as she passed from one attitude to another. Only one fact disturbed her: there was a hint of too much fullness in the curves of her neck and in the spring of her hips. She was tall enough to carry off a little extra weight, but excessive slimness was the fashion, and she shuddered at the thought that she might some day deviate from the perpendicular.

Presently she ceased to twist and sparkle at her image, and sinking into her chair gave herself up to retrospection. She was vexed, in looking back, to think how little notice she had taken of young Marvell, who turned out to be so much less negligible than his brilliant friend. She remembered thinking him rather shy, less accustomed to society; and though in his quiet deprecating way he had said one or two droll things he lacked Mr. Popple’s masterly manner, his domineering yet caressing address. When Mr. Popple had fixed his black eyes on Undine, and murmured something artistic about the color of her hair, she had thrilled to the depths of her being. Even now it seemed incredible that he should not turn out to be more distinguished than young Marvell: he seemed so much more in the key of the world she read about in the Sunday papers—the dazzling auriferous world of the Van Degens, the Driscolls and their peers.

She was roused by the sound in the hall of her mother’s last words to Mrs. Heeny. Undine waited till their adieux were over: then, opening her door, she seized the astonished masseuse and dragged her into the room.

Mrs. Heeny gazed in admiration at the luminous apparition in whose hold she found herself.

Mercy, Undine—you do look stunning! Are you trying on your dress for Mrs. Fairford’s?

Yes—no—this is only an old thing. The girl’s eyes glittered under their black brows. "Mrs. Heeny, you’ve got to tell me the truth—are they as swell as you said?"

Who? The Fairfords and Marvells? If they ain’t swell enough for you, Undine Spragg, you’d better go right over to the court of En-gland!

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

Mrs. Heeny sounded a scornful laugh. Look here, now, you unbelieving girl! As sure as I’m standing here before you, I’ve seen Mrs. Harmon B. Driscoll of Fifth Avenue laying in her pink velvet bed with Honiton lace sheets on it, and crying her eyes out because she couldn’t get asked to one of Mrs. Paul Marvell’s musicals. She’d never ’a dreamt of being asked to a dinner there! Not all of her money couldn’t ’a bought her that—and she knows it!

Undine stood for a moment with bright cheeks and parted lips; then she flung her soft arms about the masseuse.

Oh, Mrs. Heeny—you’re lovely to me! she breathed, her lips on Mrs. Heeny’s rusty veil; while the latter, freeing herself with a good-natured laugh, said as she turned away: Go steady, Undine, and you’ll get anywheres.

Go steady, Undine! Yes, that was the advice she needed. Sometimes, in her dark moods, she blamed her parents for not having given it to her. She was so young…and they had told her so little! As she looked back she shuddered at some of her escapes. Even since they had come to New York she had been on the verge of one or two perilous adventures, and there had been a moment during their first winter when she had actually engaged herself to the handsome Austrian riding-master who accompanied her in the Park. He had carelessly shown her a card-case with a coronet, and had confided in her that he had been forced to resign from a crack cavalry regiment for fighting a duel about a Countess; and as a result of these confidences she had pledged herself to him, and bestowed on him her pink pearl ring in exchange for one of twisted silver, which he said the Countess had given him on her deathbed with the request that he should never take it off till he met a woman more beautiful than herself.

Soon afterward, luckily, Undine had run across Mabel Lipscomb, whom she had known at a middle western boarding-school as Mabel Blitch. Miss Blitch occupied a position of distinction as the only New York girl at the school, and for a time there had been sharp rivalry for her favor between Undine and Indiana Frusk, whose parents had somehow contrived—for one term—to obtain her admission to the same establishment. In spite of Indiana’s unscrupulous methods, and of a certain violent way she had of capturing attention, the victory remained with Undine, whom Mabel pronounced more refined; and the discomfited Indiana, denouncing her schoolmates as a bunch of mushes, had disappeared for ever from the scene of her defeat.

Since then Mabel had returned to New York and married a stock-broker; and Undine’s first steps in social enlightenment dated from the day when she had met Mrs. Harry Lipscomb, and been again taken under her wing.

Harry Lipscomb had insisted on investigating the riding-master’s record, and had found that his real name was Aaronson, and that he had left Cracow under a charge of swindling servant-girls out of their savings; in the light of which discoveries Undine noticed for the first time