"Father, you've got to take a box for me at the opera next Friday."
From the tone of her voice Undine's parents knew at once that she was
"nervous."
They had counted a great deal on the Fairford dinner as a means of
tranquillization, and it was a blow to detect signs of the opposite
result when, late the next morning, their daughter came dawdling into
the sodden splendour of the Stentorian breakfast-room.
The symptoms of Undine's nervousness were unmistakable to Mr. and Mrs.
Spragg. They could read the approaching storm in the darkening of her
eyes from limpid grey to slate-colour, and in the way her straight
black brows met above them and the red curves of her lips narrowed to a
parallel line below.
Mr. Spragg, having finished the last course of his heterogeneous meal,
was adjusting his gold eye-glasses for a glance at the paper when
Undine trailed down the sumptuous stuffy room, where coffee-fumes hung
perpetually under the emblazoned ceiling and the spongy carpet might
have absorbed a year's crumbs without a sweeping.
About them sat other pallid families, richly dressed, and silently
eating their way through a bill-of-fare which seemed to have ransacked
the globe for gastronomic incompatibilities; and in the middle of the
room a knot of equally pallid waiters, engaged in languid conversation,
turned their backs by common consent on the persons they were supposed
to serve.
Undine, who rose too late to share the family breakfast, usually had her
chocolate brought to her in bed by Celeste, after the manner described
in the articles on "A Society Woman's Day" which were appearing in
Boudoir Chat. Her mere appearance in the restaurant therefore prepared
her parents for those symptoms of excessive tension which a nearer
inspection confirmed, and Mr. Spragg folded his paper and hooked his
glasses to his waistcoat with the air of a man who prefers to know the
worst and have it over.
"An opera box!" faltered Mrs. Spragg, pushing aside the bananas and
cream with which she had been trying to tempt an appetite too languid
for fried liver or crab mayonnaise.
"A parterre box," Undine corrected, ignoring the exclamation, and
continuing to address herself to her father. "Friday's the stylish
night, and that new tenor's going to sing again in 'Cavaleeria,'" she
condescended to explain.
"That so?" Mr. Spragg thrust his hands into his waistcoat pockets, and
began to tilt his chair till he remembered there was no wall to meet it.
He regained his balance and said: "Wouldn't a couple of good orchestra
seats do you?"
"No; they wouldn't," Undine answered with a darkening brow. He looked at
her humorously. "You invited the whole dinner-party, I suppose?"
"No--no one."
"Going all alone in a box?" She was disdainfully silent. "I don't s'pose
you're thinking of taking mother and me?"
This was so obviously comic that they all laughed--even Mrs. Spragg--and
Undine went on more mildly: "I want to do something for Mabel Lipscomb:
make some return. She's always taking me 'round, and I've never done a
thing for her--not a single thing."
This appeal to the national belief in the duty of reciprocal "treating"
could not fail of its effect, and Mrs. Spragg murmured: "She never HAS,
Abner,"--but Mr. Spragg's brow remained unrelenting.
"Do you know what a box costs?"
"No; but I s'pose you do," Undine returned with unconscious flippancy.
"I do. That's the trouble. WHY won't seats do you?"
"Mabel could buy seats for herself."
"That's so," interpolated Mrs. Spragg--always the first to succumb to
her daughter's arguments.
"Well, I guess I can't buy a box for her."
Undine's face gloomed more deeply. She sat silent, her chocolate
thickening in the cup, while one hand, almost as much beringed as her
mother's, drummed on the crumpled table-cloth.
"We might as well go straight back to Apex," she breathed at last
between her teeth.
Mrs. Spragg cast a frightened glance at her husband. These struggles
between two resolute wills always brought on her palpitations, and she
wished she had her phial of digitalis with her.
"A parterre box costs a hundred and twenty-five dollars a night," said
Mr. Spragg, transferring a toothpick to his waistcoat pocket.
"I only want it once."
He looked at her with a quizzical puckering of his crows'-feet. "You
only want most things once. Undine."
It was an observation they had made in her earliest youth--Undine never
wanted anything long, but she wanted it "right off." And until she got
it the house was uninhabitable.
"I'd a good deal rather have a box for the season," she rejoined, and he
saw the opening he had given her. She had two ways of getting things
out of him against his principles; the tender wheedling way, and the
harsh-lipped and cold--and he did not know which he dreaded most. As a
child they had admired her assertiveness, had made Apex ring with their
boasts of it; but it had long since cowed Mrs. Spragg, and it was
beginning to frighten her husband.
"Fact is, Undie," he said, weakening, "I'm a little mite strapped just
this month."
Her eyes grew absent-minded, as they always did when he alluded to
business. THAT was man's province; and what did men go "down town" for
but to bring back the spoils to their women? She rose abruptly, leaving
her parents seated, and said, more to herself than the others: "Think
I'll go for a ride."
"Oh, Undine!" fluttered Mrs. Spragg. She always had palpitations when
Undine rode, and since the Aaronson episode her fears were not confined
to what the horse might do.
"Why don't you take your mother out shopping a little?" Mr. Spragg
suggested, conscious of the limitation of his resources.
Undine made no answer, but swept down the room, and out of the door
ahead of her mother, with scorn and anger in every line of her arrogant
young back. Mrs. Spragg tottered meekly after her, and Mr. Spragg
lounged out into the marble hall to buy a cigar before taking the Subway
to his office.
Undine went for a ride, not because she felt particularly disposed for
the exercise, but because she wished to discipline her mother. She was
almost sure she would get her opera box, but she did not see why she
should have to struggle for her rights, and she was especially annoyed
with Mrs. Spragg for seconding her so half-heartedly. If she and her
mother did not hold together in such crises she would have twice the
work to do.
Undine hated "scenes": she was essentially peace-loving, and would have
preferred to live on terms of unbroken harmony with her parents. But
she could not help it if they were unreasonable. Ever since she could
remember there had been "fusses" about money; yet she and her mother had
always got what they wanted, apparently without lasting detriment to the
family fortunes. It was therefore natural to conclude that there were
ample funds to draw upon, and that Mr. Spragg's occasional resistances
were merely due to an imperfect understanding of what constituted the
necessities of life.
When she returned from her ride Mrs. Spragg received her as if she had
come back from the dead. It was absurd, of course; but Undine was inured
to the absurdity of parents.
"Has father telephoned?" was her first brief question.
"No, he hasn't yet."
Undine's lips tightened, but she proceeded deliberately with the removal
of her habit.
"You'd think I'd asked him to buy me the Opera House, the way
he's acting over a single box," she muttered, flinging aside her
smartly-fitting coat. Mrs. Spragg received the flying garment and
smoothed it out on the bed. Neither of the ladies could "bear" to have
their maid about when they were at their toilet, and Mrs. Spragg had
always performed these ancillary services for Undine.
"You know, Undie, father hasn't always got the money in his pocket, and
the bills have been pretty heavy lately. Father was a rich man for Apex,
but that's different from being rich in New York."
She stood before her daughter, looking down on her appealingly.
Undine, who had seated herself while she detached her stock and
waistcoat, raised her head with an impatient jerk. "Why on earth did we
ever leave Apex, then?" she exclaimed.
Mrs. Spragg's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze;
but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck
courage, till Undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks.
She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while Mrs. Spragg,
relapsing from temerity to meekness, hovered about her with obstructive
zeal. "If you'd only just let go of my skirt, mother--I can unhook it
twice as quick myself."
Mrs. Spragg drew back, understanding that her presence was no longer
wanted. But on the threshold she paused, as if overruled by a stronger
influence, and said, with a last look at her daughter: "You didn't meet
anybody when you were out, did you, Undie?"
Undine's brows drew together: she was struggling with her long
patent-leather boot.
"Meet anybody? Do you mean anybody I know? I don't KNOW anybody--I never
shall, if father can't afford to let me go round with people!"
The boot was off with a wrench, and she flung it violently across the
old-rose carpet, while Mrs. Spragg, turning away to hide a look of
inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room.
The day wore on. Undine had meant to go down and tell Mabel Lipscomb
about the Fairford dinner, but its aftertaste was flat on her lips. What
would it lead to? Nothing, as far as she could see. Ralph Marvell had
not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess to
Mabel that he had not driven home with her.
Suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which
Mrs. Fairford had spoken. Perhaps she might meet some of the people she
had seen at dinner--from their talk one might have imagined that they
spent their lives in picture-galleries.
The thought reanimated her, and she put on her handsomest furs, and a
hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It
was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undine knew none of the
ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to
content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake
along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and
her vanity craved a choicer fare.
When she reached the art gallery which Mrs. Fairford had named she found
it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue; and some of the ladies and
gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the "look" which signified
social consecration. As Undine made her way among them, she was aware of
attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself
into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the
catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables, while ripples of
self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back.
Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining
the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds
and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the
opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements
and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and
promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating
desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So
violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the
eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout
tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand.
As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she
noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused
with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would
have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some
vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this
grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick
as ear-lobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable
newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated,
with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie....
"Oh, thank you," she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat
in hand, saying sociably:
"The crowd's simply awful, isn't it?"
At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a
tap of her wand, and a careless "Peter, look at this," swept him to the
other side of the gallery.
Undine's heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had
identified him. Peter Van Degen--who could he be but young Peter Van
Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of
Ralph Marvell's cousin, the hero of "Sunday Supplements," the captor of
Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of
winning race-horses and "crack" sloops: the supreme exponent, in short,
of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable
outside the magic ring of the Society Column? Undine smiled as she
recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on
her--it almost consoled her for his wife's indifference!
When she reached home she found that she could not remember anything
about the pictures she had seen...
There was no message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in.
Of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel? She
would probably never meet Peter Van Degen again--or, if she DID run
across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue
their conversation without being "introduced." What was the use of being
beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to
relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited?
Her gloom was not lightened by finding Ralph Marvell's card on the
drawing-room table. She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of
him to call without making an appointment: it seemed to show that he
did not wish to continue their acquaintance. But as she tossed the card
aside her mother said: "He was real sorry not to see you. Undine--he sat
here nearly an hour."
Undine's attention was roused. "Sat here--all alone? Didn't you tell him
I was out?"
"Yes--but he came up all the same. He asked for me."
"Asked for YOU?"
The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine's feet. A
visitor who asked for a girl's mother!--she stared at Mrs. Spragg with
cold incredulity. "What makes you think he did?"
"Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they
said he'd asked for me." Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself--it
was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a
hypothetical explanation.
Undine shrugged her shoulders. "It was a mistake, of course. Why on
earth did you let him come up?"
"I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie."
This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "Well, did he?" she
asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx
table.
"Why, no--he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make
out what he was after," Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own.
Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "You
never CAN," she murmured, turning away.
She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and
lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Spragg timidly
slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself
behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out
down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It
was one of Mrs. Spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting
of New York.
Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in
one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a
long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to
an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the
future would be. And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she
sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best.
Her first struggle--after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk
for a new toy--had been to get away from Apex in summer. Her summers,
as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and
most exasperating in her life. The earliest had been spent in the yellow
"frame" cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes
against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and
half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from
her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at
the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb,
had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated
floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House
had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of
lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks, and making it possible for
Undine, when she met Indiana in the street or at school, to chill her
advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life. But
even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it
implied, the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown,
torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had
been in the little yellow house. At school Undine met other girls whose
parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to
California, others--oh bliss ineffable!--went "east."
Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealey House
routine, Undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate-pencils and drank
pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill-health; and when she
learned that even Indiana Frusk was to go on a month's visit to Buffalo
it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. Her
parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the
necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred
themselves for a month to a staring hotel on a glaring lake.
There Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to
Indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own
against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the
acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining
engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the
newly developed Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor's dismay, her
repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the
general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation
to Undine. There was something still better beyond, then--more
luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! She once said to herself,
afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about
the "something beyond." But in this case it was not too late--and
obstinately, inflexibly, she set herself to the task of forcing her
parents to take her "east" the next summer.
Yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a
Virginia "resort," where Undine had her first glimpse of more romantic
possibilities--leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain
glades, and an atmosphere of Christmas-chromo sentimentality that
tempered her hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more
delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled by a
peep through another door. Undine, after a first mustering of the other
girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first--till the
arrival, from Washington, of Mr. and Mrs. Wincher and their daughter.
Undine was much handsomer than Miss Wincher, but she saw at a glance
that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her
plainness. She was exasperated too, by the discovery that Miss Wincher
seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but
actually unaware of her existence. Listless, long-faced, supercilious,
the young lady from Washington sat apart reading novels or playing
solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel's loud life of
gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. Undine never
even succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book
when the Apex beauty trailed or rattled past her secluded corner. But
one day an acquaintance of the Winchers' turned up--a lady from Boston,
who had come to Virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of Miss
Wincher's conversation with the newcomer, Undine, straining her ears
behind a column of the long veranda, obtained a new glimpse into the
unimagined.
The Winchers, it appeared, found themselves at Potash Springs merely
because a severe illness of Mrs. Wincher's had made it impossible, at
the last moment, to move her farther from Washington. They had let their
house on the North Shore, and as soon as they could leave "this dreadful
hole" were going to Europe for the autumn. Miss Wincher simply didn't
know how she got through the days; though no doubt it was as good as
a rest-cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have
preferred to hire a house, but the "hole," if one could believe it,
didn't offer one; so they had simply shut themselves off as best
they could from the "hotel crew"--had her friend, Miss Wincher
parenthetically asked, happened to notice the Sunday young men? They
were queerer even than the "belles" they came for--and had escaped the
promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a
dining-room, and picnicking there--with the Persimmon House standards,
one couldn't describe it in any other way! But luckily the awful place
was doing mamma good, and now they had nearly served their term...
Undine turned sick as she listened. Only the evening before she had
gone on a "buggy-ride" with a young gentleman from Deposit--a dentist's
assistant--and had let him kiss her, and given him the flower from her
hair. She loathed the thought of him now: she loathed all the people
about her, and most of all the disdainful Miss Wincher. It enraged her
to think that the Winchers classed her with the "hotel crew"--with the
"belles" who awaited their Sunday young men. The place was forever
blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed but thankful
parents back to Apex.
But Miss Wincher's depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the
pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest. She had heard the call
of the Atlantic seaboard, and the next summer found the Spraggs at Skog
Harbour, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled
it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare wind-beaten inn, all
shingles without and blueberry pie within, was "exclusive," parochial,
Bostonian; and the Spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank
unmitigated isolation. The incomprehensible part of it was that every
other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly--and most of them
all three. If there had been any competition on ordinary lines Undine
would have won, as Van Degen said, "hands down." But there wasn't--the
other "guests" simply formed a cold impenetrable group who walked,
boated, played golf, and discussed Christian Science and the Subliminal,
unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their
rock-bound circle.
It was on the day the Spraggs left Skog Harbour that Undine vowed to
herself with set lips: "I'll never try anything again till I try New
York." Now she had gained her point and tried New York, and so far, it
seemed, with no better success. From small things to great, everything
went against her. In such hours of self-searching she was ready enough
to acknowledge her own mistakes, but they exasperated her less than the
blunders of her parents. She was sure, for instance, that she was on
what Mrs. Heeny called "the right tack" at last: yet just at the moment
when her luck seemed about to turn she was to be thwarted by her
father's stupid obstinacy about the opera-box...
She lay brooding over these things till long after Mrs. Spragg had gone
away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o'clock when she heard
her father's dragging tread in the hall.
She kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved
about behind her, laying aside his hat and overcoat; then his steps came
close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book.
"Oh, father!" She sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her
fingers twitching for the tickets. But a substantial packet emerged,
like nothing she had ever seen. She looked at it, hoping, fearing--she
beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile
continued to tantalize her. Then she closed on him with a rush,
smothering his words against her hair.
"It's for more than one night--why, it's for every other Friday! Oh, you
darling, you darling!" she exulted.
Mr. Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. "That so?
They must have given me the wrong--!" Then, convicted by her radiant
eyes as she swung round on him: "I knew you only wanted it ONCE for
yourself. Undine; but I thought maybe, off nights, you'd like to send it
to your friends."
Mrs. Spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this
closing pleasantry, came forward as Undine hurried away to dress.
"Abner--can you really manage it all right?"
He answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. "Don't you fret
about that, Leota. I'm bound to have her go round with these people she
knows. I want her to be with them all she can."
A pause fell between them, while Mrs. Spragg looked anxiously into his
fagged eyes.
"You seen Elmer again?"
"No. Once was enough," he returned, with a scowl like Undine's.
"Why--you SAID he couldn't come after her, Abner!"
"No more he can. But what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and
want to go after him?"
Mrs. Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. "How'd he look? Just the
same?" she whispered.
"No. Spruced up. That's what scared me."
It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless
cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. "You look
fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach
drops right off," she proposed.
But he parried this with his unfailing humour. "I guess I'm too sick to
risk that." He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture
familiar to Apex City. "Come along down to dinner, mother--I guess
Undine won't mind if I don't rig up to-night."
V
She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony--she had looked
up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a
line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose
privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that
the curtain has fallen.
As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel
Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her
apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the
faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness
seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from
the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze
of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast
illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the
shafts of light into a centre.
It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the
curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the
scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering
the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to
subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made
her feel so oddly brittle and transparent.
When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle
change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had
set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads
twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers
dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background.
Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her
opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being
able to name them--fixed figure-heads of the social prow--others she
recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom
she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she
pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless.
Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized
her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not
use it! What on earth could the people be doing--what rarer delight
could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes
and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme,
and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays
and Fridays, Mrs. Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty
because Mrs. Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! "PETER WILL
BE AT ONE OF HIS DINNERS." Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen
dining-room--she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding
--with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and
Ralph Marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to
take a light from his hostess's cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes
on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction,
and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the
glitter of jewels on Mrs. Van Degen's bare shoulders to the way young
Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened.
Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had
been "taken" by her--that she could ever really count among these happy
self-absorbed people! They all had their friends, their ties, their
delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an
intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated?
As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen
dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was
horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a
poisoned atmosphere. She remembered that an eminent divine was preaching
a series of sermons against Social Corruption, and she determined to go
and hear him on the following Sunday.
This train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being
intently observed from the neighbouring box. She turned around with a
feint of speaking to Mrs. Lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of Peter
Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had
replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely-set brilliants,
which, at word from her companion, she critically bent on Undine.
"No--I don't remember," she said; and the girl reddened, divining
herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny.
But there was no doubt as to young Van Degen's remembering her. She was
even conscious that he was trying to provoke in her some reciprocal sign
of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her
programme.
"Why, there's Mr. Popple over there!" exclaimed Mabel Lipscomb, making
large signs across the house with fan and play-bill.
Undine had already become aware that Mabel, planted, blond and brimming,
too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of
drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect
of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way: a
gestureless mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes.
Still, Undine could not help following Mrs. Lipscomb's glance, and
there in fact was Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and
bending easily over what she felt must be the back of a brilliant woman.
He replied by a discreet salute to Mrs. Lipscomb's intemperate motions,
and Undine saw the brilliant woman's opera-glass turn in their
direction, and said to herself that in a moment Mr. Popple would be
"round." But the entr'acte wore on, and no one turned the handle of
their door, or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of Harry Lipscomb, who,
not being (as he put it) "onto" grand opera, had abandoned the struggle
and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. Undine jealously
watched Mr. Popple's progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to
brilliant woman; but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door
he reappeared at his original post across the house.
"Undie, do look--there's Mr. Marvell!" Mabel began again, with another
conspicuous outbreak of signalling; and this time Undine flushed to the
nape as Mrs. Peter Van Degen appeared in the opposite box with Ralph
Marvell behind her. The two seemed to be alone in the box--as they had
doubtless been alone all the evening!--and Undine furtively turned to
see if Mr. Van Degen shared her disapproval. But Mr. Van Degen had
disappeared, and Undine, leaning forward, nervously touched Mabel's arm.
"What's the matter. Undine? Don't you see Mr. Marvell over there? Is
that his sister he's with?"
"No.--I wouldn't beckon like that," Undine whispered between her teeth.
"Why not? Don't you want him to know you're here?"
"Yes--but the other people are not beckoning."
Mabel looked about unabashed. "Perhaps they've all found each other.
Shall I send Harry over to tell him?" she shouted above the blare of the
wind instruments.
"NO!" gasped Undine as the curtain rose.
She was no longer capable of following the action on the stage. Two
presences possessed her imagination: that of Ralph Marvell, small,
unattainable, remote, and that of Mabel Lipscomb, near-by, immense and
irrepressible.
It had become clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That
was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to
be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side: Mabel, monumental
and moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, Mabel
strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. At the
Stentorian she was the centre of her group--here she revealed herself
as unknown and unknowing. Why, she didn't even know that Mrs. Peter Van
Degen was not Ralph Marvell's sister! And she had a way of trumpeting
out her ignorances that jarred on Undine's subtler methods. It was
precisely at this point that there dawned on Undine what was to be one
of the guiding principles of her career: "IT'S BETTER TO WATCH THAN TO
ASK QUESTIONS."
The curtain fell again, and Undine's eyes flew back to the Van Degen
box. Several men were entering it together, and a moment later she saw
Ralph Marvell rise from his seat and pass out. Half-unconsciously she
placed herself in such a way as to have an eye on the door of the box.
But its handle remained unturned, and Harry Lipscomb, leaning back
on the sofa, his head against the opera cloaks, continued to breathe
stentorously through his open mouth and stretched his legs a little
farther across the threshold...
The entr'acte was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen
stumbled over Mr. Lipscomb's legs. The foremost was Claud Walsingham
Popple; and above his shoulder shone the batrachian countenance of Peter
Van Degen. A brief murmur from Mr. Popple made his companion known to
the two ladies, and Mr. Van Degen promptly seated himself behind Undine,
relegating the painter to Mrs. Lipscomb's elbow.
"Queer go--I happened to see your friend there waving to old Popp across
the house. So I bolted over and collared him: told him he'd got to
introduce me before he was a minute older. I tried to find out who
you were the other day at the Motor Show--no, where was it? Oh, those
pictures at Goldmark's. What d'you think of 'em, by the way? You ought
to be painted yourself--no, I mean it, you know--you ought to get old
Popp to do you. He'd do your hair ripplingly. You must let me come and
talk to you about it... About the picture or your hair? Well, your hair
if you don't mind. Where'd you say you were staying? Oh, you LIVE here,
do you? I say, that's first rate!"
Undine sat well forward, curving toward him a little, as she had seen
the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible
to the house that she was conversing with no less a person than Mr.
Peter Van Degen. Mr. Popple's talk was certainly more brilliant and
purposeful, and she saw him cast longing glances at her from behind Mrs.
Lipscomb's shoulder; but she remembered how lightly he had been treated
at the Fairford dinner, and she wanted--oh, how she wanted!--to have
Ralph Marvell see her talking to Van Degen.
She poured out her heart to him, improvising an opinion on the pictures
and an opinion on the music, falling in gaily with his suggestion of
a jolly little dinner some night soon, at the Café Martin, and
strengthening her position, as she thought, by an easy allusion to her
acquaintance with Mrs. Van Degen. But at the word her companion's eye
clouded, and a shade of constraint dimmed his enterprising smile.
"My wife--? Oh, SHE doesn't go to restaurants--she moves on too high a
plane. But we'll get old Popp, and Mrs.--, Mrs.--, what'd you say your
fat friend's name was? Just a select little crowd of four--and some kind
of a cheerful show afterward... Jove! There's the curtain, and I must
skip."
As the door closed on him Undine's cheeks burned with resentment. If
Mrs. Van Degen didn't go to restaurants, why had he supposed that SHE
would? and to have to drag Mabel in her wake! The leaden sense of
failure overcame her again. Here was the evening nearly over, and what
had it led to? Looking up from the stalls, she had fancied that to sit
in a box was to be in society--now she saw it might but emphasize one's
exclusion. And she was burdened with the box for the rest of the season!
It was really stupid of her father to have exceeded his instructions:
why had he not done as she told him?... Undine felt helpless and
tired... hateful memories of Apex crowded back on her. Was it going to
be as dreary here as there?
She felt Lipscomb's loud whisper in her back: "Say, you girls, I guess
I'll cut this and come back for you when the show busts up." They heard
him shuffle out of the box, and Mabel settled back to undisturbed
enjoyment of the stage.
When the last entr'acte began Undine stood up, resolved to stay no
longer. Mabel, lost in the study of the audience, had not noticed her
movement, and as she passed alone into the back of the box the door
opened and Ralph Marvell came in.
Undine stood with one arm listlessly raised to detach her cloak from the
wall. Her attitude showed the long slimness of her figure and the fresh
curve of the throat below her bent-back head. Her face was paler and
softer than usual, and the eyes she rested on Marvell's face looked deep
and starry under their fixed brows.
"Oh--you're not going?" he exclaimed.
"I thought you weren't coming," she answered simply.
"I waited till now on purpose to dodge your other visitors."