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

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СКАЧАТЬ his overcoat across one of the gilt chairs. He was tallish, grey-bearded and somewhat stooping, with the slack figure of the sedentary man who would be stout if he were not dyspeptic; and his cautious grey eyes with pouch-like underlids had straight black brows like his daughter’s. His thin hair was worn a little too long over his coat collar, and a Masonic emblem dangled from the heavy gold chain which crossed his crumpled black waistcoat.

      He stood still in the middle of the room, casting a slow pioneering glance about its gilded void; then he said gently: “Well, mother?”

      Mrs. Spragg remained seated, but her eyes dwelt on him affectionately. “Undine’s been asked out to a dinner-party; and Mrs. Heeny says it’s to one of the first families. It’s the sister of one of the gentlemen that Mabel Lipscomb introduced her to last night.”

      There was a mild triumph in her tone, for it was owing to her insistence and Undine’s that Mr. Spragg had been induced to give up the house they had bought in West End Avenue, and move with his family to the Stentorian. Undine had early decided that they could not hope to get on while they “kept house”—all the fashionable people she knew either boarded or lived in hotels. Mrs. Spragg was easily induced to take the same view, but Mr. Spragg had resisted, being at the moment unable either to sell his house or to let it as advantageously as he had hoped. After the move was made it seemed for a time as though he had been right, and the first social steps would be as difficult to make in a hotel as in one’s own house; and Mrs. Spragg was therefore eager to have him know that Undine really owed her first invitation to a meeting under the roof of the Stentorian.

      “You see we were right to come here, Abner,” she added, and he absently rejoined: “I guess you two always manage to be right.”

      But his face remained unsmiling, and instead of seating himself and lighting his cigar, as he usually did before dinner, he took two or three aimless turns about the room, and then paused in front of his wife.

      “What’s the matter—anything wrong down town?” she asked, her eyes reflecting his anxiety.

      Mrs. Spragg’s knowledge of what went on “down town” was of the most elementary kind, but her husband’s face was the barometer in which she had long been accustomed to read the leave to go on unrestrictedly, or the warning to pause and abstain till the coming storm should be weathered.

      He shook his head. “N—no. Nothing worse than what I can see to, if you and Undine will go steady for a while.” He paused and looked across the room at his daughter’s door. “Where is she—out?”

      “I guess she’s in her room, going over her dresses with that French maid. I don’t know as she’s got anything fit to wear to that dinner,” Mrs. Spragg added in a tentative murmur.

      Mr. Spragg smiled at last. “Well—I guess she WILL have,” he said prophetically.

      He glanced again at his daughter’s door, as if to make sure of its being shut; then, standing close before his wife, he lowered his voice to say: “I saw Elmer Moffatt down town to-day.”

      “Oh, Abner!” A wave of almost physical apprehension passed over Mrs. Spragg. Her jewelled hands trembled in her black brocade lap, and the pulpy curves of her face collapsed as if it were a pricked balloon.

      “Oh, Abner,” she moaned again, her eyes also on her daughter’s door. Mr. Spragg’s black eyebrows gathered in an angry frown, but it was evident that his anger was not against his wife.

      “What’s the good of Oh Abner-ing? Elmer Moffatt’s nothing to us—no more’n if we never laid eyes on him.”

      “No—I know it; but what’s he doing here? Did you speak to him?” she faltered.

      He slipped his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. “No—I guess Elmer and I are pretty well talked out.”

      Mrs. Spragg took up her moan. “Don’t you tell her you saw him, Abner.”

      “I’ll do as you say; but she may meet him herself.”

      “Oh, I guess not—not in this new set she’s going with! Don’t tell her ANYHOW.”

      He turned away, feeling for one of the cigars which he always carried loose in his pocket; and his wife, rising, stole after him, and laid her hand on his arm.

      “He can’t do anything to her, can he?”

      “Do anything to her?” He swung about furiously. “I’d like to see him touch her—that’s all!”

      II

       Table of Contents

      Undine’s white and gold bedroom, with sea-green panels and old rose carpet, looked along Seventy-second Street toward the leafless tree-tops of the Central Park.

      She went to the window, and drawing back its many layers of lace gazed eastward down the long brownstone perspective. Beyond the Park lay Fifth Avenue—and Fifth Avenue was where she wanted to be!

      She turned back into the room, and going to her writing-table laid Mrs. Fairford’s note before her, and began to study it minutely. She had read in the “Boudoir Chat” of one of the Sunday papers that the smartest women were using the new pigeon-blood notepaper with white ink; and rather against her mother’s advice she had ordered a large supply, with her monogram in silver. It was a disappointment, therefore, to find that Mrs. Fairford wrote on the old-fashioned white sheet, without even a monogram—simply her address and telephone number. It gave Undine rather a poor opinion of Mrs. Fairford’s social standing, and for a moment she thought with considerable satisfaction of answering the note on her pigeon-blood paper. Then she remembered Mrs. Heeny’s emphatic commendation of Mrs. Fairford, and her pen wavered. What if white paper were really newer than pigeon blood? It might be more stylish, anyhow. Well, she didn’t care if Mrs. Fairford didn’t like red paper—SHE did! And she wasn’t going to truckle to any woman who lived in a small house down beyond Park Avenue…

      Undine was fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative. She wanted to surprise every one by her dash and originality, but she could not help modelling herself on the last person she met, and the confusion of ideals thus produced caused her much perturbation when she had to choose between two courses. She hesitated a moment longer, and then took from the drawer a plain sheet with the hotel address.

      It was amusing to write the note in her mother’s name—she giggled as she formed the phrase “I shall be happy to permit my daughter to take dinner with you” (“take dinner” seemed more elegant than Mrs. Fairford’s “dine”)—but when she came to the signature she was met by a new difficulty. Mrs. Fairford had signed herself “Laura Fairford”—just as one school-girl would write to another. But could this be a proper model for Mrs. Spragg? Undine could not tolerate the thought of her mother’s abasing herself to a denizen of regions beyond Park Avenue, and she resolutely formed the signature: “Sincerely, Mrs. Abner E. Spragg.” Then uncertainty overcame her, and she re-wrote her note and copied Mrs. Fairford’s formula: “Yours sincerely, Leota B. Spragg.” But this struck her as an odd juxtaposition of formality and freedom, and she made a third attempt: “Yours with love, Leota B. Spragg.” This, however, seemed excessive, as the ladies had never met; and after several other experiments she finally decided on a compromise, and ended the note: “Yours sincerely, Mrs. Leota B. Spragg.” That might be conventional. Undine reflected, but it was certainly correct. This point settled, СКАЧАТЬ