In another moment Van Degen would be gone. Worse
yet, while he wavered in the doorway the Shallums
and Chelles, after vainly awaiting her, might dash
back from the Bois and break in on them. These
and other chances rose before her, urging her to action;
but she held fast, immovable, unwavering, a proud
yet plaintive image of renunciation.
Van Degen’s hand was on the door. He half-opened
it and then turned back.
“That’s all you’ve got to say, then?”
“That’s all.”
He jerked the door open and passed out. She saw
him stop in the ante-room to pick up his hat and stick,
his heavy figure silhouetted against the glare of
the wall-lights. A ray of the same light fell
on her where she stood in the unlit sitting-room, and
her reflection bloomed out like a flower from the
mirror that faced her. She looked at the image
and waited. Van Degen put his hat on his head
and slowly opened the door into the outer hall.
Then he turned abruptly, his bulk eclipsing her reflection
as he plunged back into the room and came up to her.
“I’ll do anything you say. Undine;
I’ll do anything in God’s world to keep
you!”
She turned her eyes from the mirror and let them rest
on his face, which looked as small and withered as
an old man’s, with a lower lip that trembled
queerly....
The spring in New York proceeded through more than
its usual extremes of temperature to the threshold
of a sultry June.
Ralph Marvell, wearily bent to his task, felt the
fantastic humours of the weather as only one more
incoherence in the general chaos of his case.
It was strange enough, after four years of marriage,
to find himself again in his old brown room in Washington
Square. It was hardly there that he had expected
Pegasus to land him; and, like a man returning to
the scenes of his childhood, he found everything on
a much smaller scale than he had imagined. Had
the Dagonet boundaries really narrowed, or had the
breach in the walls of his own life let in a wider
vision?
Certainly there had come to be other differences between
his present and his former self than that embodied
in the presence of his little boy in the next room.
Paul, in fact, was now the chief link between Ralph
and his past. Concerning his son he still felt
and thought, in a general way, in the terms of the
Dagonet tradition; he still wanted to implant in Paul
some of the reserves and discriminations which divided
that tradition from the new spirit of limitless concession.
But for himself it was different. Since his transaction
with Moffatt he had had the sense of living under
a new dispensation. He was not sure that it was
any worse than the other; but then he was no longer
very sure about anything. Perhaps this growing
indifference was merely the reaction from a long nervous
strain: that his mother and sister thought it
so was shown by the way in which they mutely watched
and hovered. Their discretion was like the hushed
tread about a sick-bed. They permitted themselves
no criticism of Undine; he was asked no awkward questions,
subjected to no ill-timed sympathy. They simply
took him back, on his own terms, into the life he
had left them to; and their silence had none of those
subtle implications of disapproval which may be so
much more wounding than speech.
