He supposed that with the putting away of this document
he was thrusting the whole subject out of sight; but
not more than a fortnight later, as he sat in the
Subway on his way down-town, his eye was caught by
his own name on the first page of the heavily head-lined
paper which the unshaved occupant of the next seat
held between grimy fists. The blood rushed to
Ralph’s forehead as he looked over the man’s
arm and read: “Society Leader Gets Decree,”
and beneath it the subordinate clause: “Says
Husband Too Absorbed In Business To Make Home Happy.”
For weeks afterward, wherever he went, he felt that
blush upon his forehead. For the first time in
his life the coarse fingering of public curiosity had
touched the secret places of his soul, and nothing
that had gone before seemed as humiliating as this
trivial comment on his tragedy. The paragraph
continued on its way through the press, and whenever
he took up a newspaper he seemed to come upon it,
slightly modified, variously developed, but always
reverting with a kind of unctuous irony to his financial
preoccupations and his wife’s consequent loneliness.
The phrase was even taken up by the paragraph writer,
called forth excited letters from similarly situated
victims, was commented on in humorous editorials and
served as a text for pulpit denunciations of the growing
craze for wealth; and finally, at his dentist’s,
Ralph came across it in a Family Weekly, as one of
the “Heart problems” propounded to subscribers,
with a Gramophone, a Straight-front Corset and a Vanity-box
among the prizes offered for its solution.
XXIV
“If you’d only had the sense to come straight
to me, Undine Spragg! There isn’t a tip
I couldn’t have given you—not one!”
This speech, in which a faintly contemptuous compassion
for her friend’s case was blent with the frankest
pride in her own, probably represented the nearest
approach to “tact” that Mrs. James J. Rolliver
had yet acquired. Undine was impartial enough
to note in it a distinct advance on the youthful methods
of Indiana Frusk; yet it required a good deal of self-control
to take the words to herself with a smile, while they
seemed to be laying a visible scarlet welt across the
pale face she kept valiantly turned to her friend.
The fact that she must permit herself to be pitied
by Indiana Frusk gave her the uttermost measure of
the depth to which her fortunes had fallen. This
abasement was inflicted on her in the staring gold
apartment of the Hotel Nouveau Luxe in which the Rollivers
had established themselves on their recent arrival
in Paris. The vast drawing-room, adorned only
by two high-shouldered gilt baskets of orchids drooping
on their wires, reminded Undine of the “Looey
suite” in which the opening scenes of her own
history had been enacted; and the resemblance and
the difference were emphasized by the fact that the
image of her past self was not inaccurately repeated
in the triumphant presence of Indiana Rolliver.
