Nothing was bitterer to her than to confess to herself the failure of
her power; but her last talk with Van Degen had taught her a lesson
almost worth the abasement. She saw the mistake she had made in taking
money from him, and understood that if she drifted into repeating that
mistake her future would be irretrievably compromised. What she wanted
was not a hand-to-mouth existence of precarious intrigue: to one with
her gifts the privileges of life should come openly. Already in her
short experience she had seen enough of the women who sacrifice future
security for immediate success, and she meant to lay solid foundations
before she began to build up the light super-structure of enjoyment.
Nevertheless it was galling to see Van Degen leave, and to know that for
the time he had broken away from her. Over a nature so insensible to the
spells of memory, the visible and tangible would always prevail. If she
could have been with him again in Paris, where, in the shining spring
days, every sight and sound ministered to such influences, she was sure
she could have regained her hold. And the sense of frustration was
intensified by the fact that every one she knew was to be there: her
potential rivals were crowding the east-bound steamers. New York was a
desert, and Ralph's seeming unconsciousness of the fact increased her
resentment. She had had but one chance at Europe since her marriage, and
that had been wasted through her husband's unaccountable perversity. She
knew now with what packed hours of Paris and London they had paid for
their empty weeks in Italy.
Meanwhile the long months of the New York spring stretched out before
her in all their social vacancy to the measureless blank of a summer in
the Adirondacks. In her girlhood she had plumbed the dim depths of such
summers; but then she had been sustained by the hope of bringing some
capture to the surface. Now she knew better: there were no "finds" for
her in that direction. The people she wanted would be at Newport or
in Europe, and she was too resolutely bent on a definite object, too
sternly animated by her father's business instinct, to turn aside in
quest of casual distractions.
The chief difficulty in the way of her attaining any distant end had
always been her reluctance to plod through the intervening stretches
of dulness and privation. She had begun to see this, but she could not
always master the weakness: never had she stood in greater need of
Mrs. Heeny's "Go slow. Undine!" Her imagination was incapable of long
flights. She could not cheat her impatience with the mirage of far-off
satisfactions, and for the moment present and future seemed equally
void. But her desire to go to Europe and to rejoin the little New York
world that was reforming itself in London and Paris was fortified by
reasons which seemed urgent enough to justify an appeal to her father.
She went down to his office to plead her case, fearing Mrs. Spragg's
intervention. For some time past Mr. Spragg had been rather continuously
overworked, and the strain was beginning to tell on him. He had never
quite regained, in New York, the financial security of his Apex days.
Since he had changed his base of operations his affairs had followed
an uncertain course, and Undine suspected that his breach with his old
political ally, the Representative Rolliver who had seen him through the
muddiest reaches of the Pure Water Move, was not unconnected with his
failure to get a footing in Wall Street. But all this was vague and
shadowy to her Even had "business" been less of a mystery, she was too
much absorbed in her own affairs to project herself into her father's
case; and she thought she was sacrificing enough to delicacy of feeling
in sparing him the "bother" of Mrs. Spragg's opposition. When she came
to him with a grievance he always heard her out with the same mild
patience; but the long habit of "managing" him had made her, in his own
language, "discount" this tolerance, and when she ceased to speak her
heart throbbed with suspense as he leaned back, twirling an invisible
toothpick under his sallow moustache. Presently he raised a hand to
stroke the limp beard in which the moustache was merged; then he groped
for the Masonic emblem that had lost itself in one of the folds of his
depleted waistcoat.
He seemed to fish his answer from the same rusty depths, for as his
fingers closed about the trinket he said: "Yes, the heated term IS
trying in New York. That's why the Fresh Air Fund pulled my last dollar
out of me last week."
Undine frowned: there was nothing more irritating, in these encounters
with her father, than his habit of opening the discussion with a joke.
"I wish you'd understand that I'm serious, father. I've never been
strong since the baby was born, and I need a change. But it's not only
that: there are other reasons for my wanting to go."
Mr. Spragg still held to his mild tone of banter. "I never knew you
short on reasons, Undie. Trouble is you don't always know other people's
when you see 'em."
His daughter's lips tightened. "I know your reasons when I see them,
father: I've heard them often enough. But you can't know mine because I
haven't told you--not the real ones."
"Jehoshaphat! I thought they were all real as long as you had a use for
them."
Experience had taught her that such protracted trifling usually
concealed an exceptional vigour of resistance, and the suspense
strengthened her determination.
"My reasons are all real enough," she answered; "but there's one more
serious than the others."