The Custom of the Country (Romance Classic). Edith Wharton

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СКАЧАТЬ gave another of her natty little dinners last Wednesday as usual it was smart small and exclusive and there was much gnashing of teeth among the left-outs as Madame Olga Loukowska gave some of her new steppe dances after dinner’—that’s the French for new dance steps,” Mrs. Heeny concluded, thrusting the documents back into her bag.

      “Do you know Mrs. Fairford too?” Undine asked eagerly; while Mrs. Spragg, impressed, but anxious for facts, pursued: “Does she reside on Fifth Avenue?”

      “No, she has a little house in Thirty-eighth Street, down beyond Park Avenue.”

      The ladies’ faces drooped again, and the masseuse went on promptly: “But they’re glad enough to have her in the big houses!—Why, yes, I know her,” she said, addressing herself to Undine. “I mass’d her for a sprained ankle a couple of years ago. She’s got a lovely manner, but NO conversation. Some of my patients converse exquisitely,” Mrs. Heeny added with discrimination.

      Undine was brooding over the note. “It IS written to mother—Mrs. Abner E. Spragg—I never saw anything so funny! ‘Will you ALLOW your daughter to dine with me?’ Allow! Is Mrs. Fairford peculiar?”

      “No—you are,” said Mrs. Heeny bluntly. “Don’t you know it’s the thing in the best society to pretend that girls can’t do anything without their mothers’ permission? You just remember that. Undine. You mustn’t accept invitations from gentlemen without you say you’ve got to ask your mother first.”

      “Mercy! But how’ll mother know what to say?”

      “Why, she’ll say what you tell her to, of course. You’d better tell her you want to dine with Mrs. Fairford,” Mrs. Heeny added humorously, as she gathered her waterproof together and stooped for her bag.

      “Have I got to write the note, then?” Mrs. Spragg asked with rising agitation.

      Mrs. Heeny reflected. “Why, no. I guess Undine can write it as if it was from you. Mrs. Fairford don’t know your writing.”

      This was an evident relief to Mrs. Spragg, and as Undine swept to her room with the note her mother sank back, murmuring plaintively: “Oh, don’t go yet, Mrs. Heeny. I haven’t seen a human being all day, and I can’t seem to find anything to say to that French maid.”

      Mrs. Heeny looked at her hostess with friendly compassion. She was well aware that she was the only bright spot on Mrs. Spragg’s horizon. Since the Spraggs, some two years previously, had moved from Apex City to New York, they had made little progress in establishing relations with their new environment; and when, about four months earlier, Mrs. Spragg’s doctor had called in Mrs. Heeny to minister professionally to his patient, he had done more for her spirit than for her body. Mrs. Heeny had had such “cases” before: she knew the rich helpless family, stranded in lonely splendour in a sumptuous West Side hotel, with a father compelled to seek a semblance of social life at the hotel bar, and a mother deprived of even this contact with her kind, and reduced to illness by boredom and inactivity. Poor Mrs. Spragg had done her own washing in her youth, but since her rising fortunes had made this occupation unsuitable she had sunk into the relative inertia which the ladies of Apex City regarded as one of the prerogatives of affluence. At Apex, however, she had belonged to a social club, and, until they moved to the Mealey House, had been kept busy by the incessant struggle with domestic cares; whereas New York seemed to offer no field for any form of ladylike activity. She therefore took her exercise vicariously, with Mrs. Heeny’s help; and Mrs. Heeny knew how to manipulate her imagination as well as her muscles. It was Mrs. Heeny who peopled the solitude of the long ghostly days with lively anecdotes of the Van Degens, the Driscolls, the Chauncey Ellings and the other social potentates whose least doings Mrs. Spragg and Undine had followed from afar in the Apex papers, and who had come to seem so much more remote since only the width of the Central Park divided mother and daughter from their Olympian portals.

      Mrs. Spragg had no ambition for herself—she seemed to have transferred her whole personality to her child—but she was passionately resolved that Undine should have what she wanted, and she sometimes fancied that Mrs. Heeny, who crossed those sacred thresholds so familiarly, might some day gain admission for Undine.

      “Well—I’ll stay a little mite longer if you want; and supposing I was to rub up your nails while we’re talking? It’ll be more sociable,” the masseuse suggested, lifting her bag to the table and covering its shiny onyx surface with bottles and polishers.

      Mrs. Spragg consentingly slipped the rings from her small mottled hands. It was soothing to feel herself in Mrs. Heeny’s grasp, and though she knew the attention would cost her three dollars she was secure in the sense that Abner wouldn’t mind. It had been clear to Mrs. Spragg, ever since their rather precipitate departure from Apex City, that Abner was resolved not to mind—resolved at any cost to “see through” the New York adventure. It seemed likely now that the cost would be considerable. They had lived in New York for two years without any social benefit to their daughter; and it was of course for that purpose that they had come. If, at the time, there had been other and more pressing reasons, they were such as Mrs. Spragg and her husband never touched on, even in the gilded privacy of their bedroom at the Stentorian; and so completely had silence closed in on the subject that to Mrs. Spragg it had become nonexistent: she really believed that, as Abner put it, they had left Apex because Undine was too big for the place.

      She seemed as yet—poor child!—too small for New York: actually imperceptible to its heedless multitudes; and her mother trembled for the day when her invisibility should be borne in on her. Mrs. Spragg did not mind the long delay for herself—she had stores of lymphatic patience. But she had noticed lately that Undine was beginning to be nervous, and there was nothing that Undine’s parents dreaded so much as her being nervous. Mrs. Spragg’s maternal apprehensions unconsciously escaped in her next words.

      “I do hope she’ll quiet down now,” she murmured, feeling quieter herself as her hand sank into Mrs. Heeny’s roomy palm.

      “Who’s that? Undine?”

      “Yes. She seemed so set on that Mr. Popple’s coming round. From the way he acted last night she thought he’d be sure to come round this morning. She’s so lonesome, poor child—I can’t say as I blame her.”

      “Oh, he’ll come round. Things don’t happen as quick as that in New York,” said Mrs. Heeny, driving her nail-polisher cheeringly.

      Mrs. Spragg sighed again. “They don’t appear to. They say New Yorkers are always in a hurry; but I can’t say as they’ve hurried much to make our acquaintance.”

      Mrs. Heeny drew back to study the effect of her work. “You wait, Mrs. Spragg, you wait. If you go too fast you sometimes have to rip out the whole seam.”

      “Oh, that’s so—that’s SO!” Mrs. Spragg exclaimed, with a tragic emphasis that made the masseuse glance up at her.

      “Of course it’s so. And it’s more so in New York than anywhere. The wrong set’s like fly-paper: once you’re in it you can pull and pull, but you’ll never get out of it again.”

      Undine’s mother heaved another and more helpless sigh. “I wish YOU’D tell Undine that, Mrs. Heeny.”

      “Oh, I guess Undine’s all right. A girl like her can afford to wait. And if young Marvell’s really taken with her she’ll have the run of the place in no time.”

      This solacing thought enabled Mrs. Spragg to yield herself unreservedly to Mrs. Heeny’s ministrations, which were prolonged for a happy confidential hour; and she had just bidden the masseuse goodbye, and СКАЧАТЬ