The next phase in the unrolling vision was the episode
of her return to New York. She had gone to the
Malibran, to her parents—for it was a moment
in her career when she clung passionately to the conformities,
and when the fact of being able to say: “I’m
here with my father and mother” was worth paying
for even in the discomfort of that grim abode.
Nevertheless, it was another thorn in her pride that
her parents could not—for the meanest of
material reasons—transfer themselves at
her coming to one of the big Fifth Avenue hotels.
When she had suggested it Mr. Spragg had briefly replied
that, owing to the heavy expenses of her divorce suit,
he couldn’t for the moment afford anything better;
and this announcement cast a deeper gloom over the
future.
It was not an occasion for being “nervous,”
however; she had learned too many hard facts in the
last few months to think of having recourse to her
youthful methods. And something told her that
if she made the attempt it would be useless.
Her father and mother seemed much older, seemed tired
and defeated, like herself.
Parents and daughter bore their common failure in
a common silence, broken only by Mrs. Spragg’s
occasional tentative allusions to her grandson.
But her anecdotes of Paul left a deeper silence behind
them. Undine did not want to talk of her boy.
She could forget him when, as she put it, things were
“going her way,” but in moments of discouragement
the thought of him was an added bitterness, subtly
different from her other bitter thoughts, and harder
to quiet. It had not occurred to her to try to
gain possession of the child. She was vaguely
aware that the courts had given her his custody; but
she had never seriously thought of asserting this
claim. Her parents’ diminished means and
her own uncertain future made her regard the care of
Paul as an additional burden, and she quieted her
scruples by thinking of him as “better off”
with Ralph’s family, and of herself as rather
touchingly disinterested in putting his welfare before
her own. Poor Mrs. Spragg was pining for him,
but Undine rejected her artless suggestion that Mrs.
Heeny should be sent to “bring him round.”
“I wouldn’t ask them a favour for the
world—they’re just waiting for a chance
to be hateful to me,” she scornfully declared;
but it pained her that her boy, should be so near,
yet inaccessible, and for the first time she was visited
by unwonted questionings as to her share in the misfortunes
that had befallen her. She had voluntarily stepped
out of her social frame, and the only person on whom
she could with any satisfaction have laid the blame
was the person to whom her mind now turned with a belated
tenderness. It was thus, in fact, that she thought
of Ralph. His pride, his reserve, all the secret
expressions of his devotion, the tones of his voice,
his quiet manner, even his disconcerting irony:
these seemed, in contrast to what she had since known,
