Clare, as if aware of the scrutiny fixed on her from below leaned back and threw a question over her shoulder to Ralph Marvell, who had just seated himself behind her.
“Who’s the funny man with the red face talking to Miss Spragg?”
Ralph bent forward. “The man next to her? Never saw him before. But I think you’re mistaken: she’s not speaking to him.”
“She WAS—Wasn’t she, Harriet?”
Miss Ray pinched her lips together without speaking, and Mrs. Van Degen paused for the fraction of a second. “Perhaps he’s an Apex friend,” she then suggested.
“Very likely. Only I think she’d have introduced him if he had been.”
His cousin faintly shrugged. “Shall you encourage that?”
Peter Van Degen, who had strayed into his wife’s box for a moment, caught the colloquy, and lifted his opera-glass.
“The fellow next to Miss Spragg? (By George, Ralph, she’s ripping tonight!) Wait a minute—I know his face. Saw him in old Harmon Driscoll’s office the day of the Eubaw Mine meeting. This chap’s his secretary, or something. Driscoll called him in to give some facts to the directors, and he seemed a mighty wide-awake customer.”
Clare Van Degen turned gaily to her cousin. “If he has anything to do with the Driscolls you’d better cultivate him! That’s the kind of acquaintance the Dagonets have always needed. I married to set them an example!”
Ralph rose with a laugh. “You’re right. I’ll hurry back and make his acquaintance.” He held out his hand to his cousin, avoiding her disappointed eyes.
Undine, on entering her bedroom late that evening, was startled by the presence of a muffled figure which revealed itself, through the dimness, as the ungirded midnight outline of Mrs. Spragg.
“MOTHER? What on earth—?” the girl exclaimed, as Mrs. Spragg pressed the electric button and flooded the room with light. The idea of a mother’s sitting up for her daughter was so foreign to Apex customs that it roused only mistrust and irritation in the object of the demonstration.
Mrs. Spragg came forward deprecatingly to lift the cloak from her daughter’s shoulders.
“I just HAD to, Undie—I told father I HAD to. I wanted to hear all about it.”
Undine shrugged away from her. “Mercy! At this hour? You’ll be as white as a sheet tomorrow, sitting up all night like this.”
She moved toward the toilet-table, and began to demolish with feverish hands the structure which Mrs. Heeny, a few hours earlier, had so lovingly raised. But the rose caught in a mesh of hair, and Mrs. Spragg, venturing timidly to release it, had a full view of her daughter’s face in the glass.
“Why, Undie, YOU’RE as white as a sheet now! You look fairly sick. What’s the matter, daughter?”
The girl broke away from her.
“Oh, can’t you leave me alone, mother? There—do I look white NOW?” she cried, the blood flaming into her pale cheeks; and as Mrs. Spragg shrank back, she added more mildly, in the tone of a parent rebuking a persistent child: “It’s enough to MAKE anybody sick to be stared at that way!”
Mrs. Spragg overflowed with compunction. “I’m so sorry, Undie. I guess it was just seeing you in this glare of light.”
“Yes—the light’s awful; do turn some off,” ordered Undine, for whom, ordinarily, no radiance was too strong; and Mrs. Spragg, grateful to have commands laid upon her, hastened to obey.
Undine, after this, submitted in brooding silence to having her dress unlaced, and her slippers and dressinggown brought to her. Mrs. Spragg visibly yearned to say more, but she restrained the impulse lest it should provoke her dismissal.
“Won’t you take just a sup of milk before you go to bed?” she suggested at length, as Undine sank into an armchair.
“I’ve got some for you right here in the parlour.”
Without looking up the girl answered: “No. I don’t want anything. Do go to bed.”
Her mother seemed to be struggling between the lifelong instinct of obedience and a swift unformulated fear. “I’m going, Undie.” She wavered. “Didn’t they receive you right, daughter?” she asked with sudden resolution.
“What nonsense! How should they receive me? Everybody was lovely to me.” Undine rose to her feet and went on with her undressing, tossing her clothes on the floor and shaking her hair over her bare shoulders.
Mrs. Spragg stooped to gather up the scattered garments as they fell, folding them with a wistful caressing touch, and laying them on the lounge, without daring to raise her eyes to her daughter. It was not till she heard Undine throw herself on the bed that she went toward her and drew the coverlet up with deprecating hands.
“Oh, do put the light out—I’m dead tired,” the girl grumbled, pressing her face into the pillow.
Mrs. Spragg turned away obediently; then, gathering all her scattered impulses into a passionate act of courage, she moved back to the bedside.
“Undie—you didn’t see anybody—I mean at the theatre? ANYBODY YOU DIDN’T WANT TO SEE?”
Undine, at the question, raised her head and started right against the tossed pillows, her white exasperated face close to her mother’s twitching features. The two women examined each other a moment, fear and anger in their crossed glances; then Undine answered: “No, nobody. Goodnight.”
IX
Undine, late the next day, waited alone under the leafless trellising of a wistaria arbour on the west side of the Central Park. She had put on her plainest dress, and wound a closely, patterned veil over her least vivid hat; but even thus toned down to the situation she was conscious of blazing out from it inconveniently.
The habit of meeting young men in sequestered spots was not unknown to her: the novelty was in feeling any embarrassment about it. Even now she—was disturbed not so much by the unlikely chance of an accidental encounter with Ralph Marvell as by the remembrance of similar meetings, far from accidental, with the romantic Aaronson. Could it be that the hand now adorned with Ralph’s engagement ring had once, in this very spot, surrendered itself to the riding-master’s pressure? At the thought a wave of physical disgust passed over her, blotting out another memory as distasteful but more remote.
It was revived by the appearance of a ruddy middle-sized young man, his stoutish figure tightly buttoned into a square-shouldered overcoat, who presently approached along the path that led to the arbour. Silhouetted against the slope of the asphalt, the newcomer revealed an outline thick yet compact, with a round head set on a neck in which, at the first chance, prosperity would be likely to develop a red crease. His face, with its rounded surfaces, and the sanguine innocence of a complexion belied by prematurely astute black eyes, had a look of jovial cunning which Undine had formerly thought “smart” but which now struck her as merely vulgar. She felt that in the Marvell set Elmer Moffatt would have
