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
