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 head-lined 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.