The Winchers, it appeared, found themselves at Potash Springs merely because a severe illness of Mrs. Wincher’s had made it impossible, at the last moment, to move her farther from Washington. They had let their house on the North Shore, and as soon as they could leave “this dreadful hole” were going to Europe for the autumn. Miss Wincher simply didn’t know how she got through the days; though no doubt it was as good as a rest-cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have preferred to hire a house, but the “hole,” if one could believe it, didn’t offer one; so they had simply shut themselves off as best they could from the “hotel crew”—had her friend, Miss Wincher parenthetically asked, happened to notice the Sunday young men? They were queerer even than the “belles” they came for—and had escaped the promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a diningroom, and picnicking there—with the Persimmon House standards, one couldn’t describe it in any other way! But luckily the awful place was doing mamma good, and now they had nearly served their term…
Undine turned sick as she listened. Only the evening before she had gone on a “buggy-ride” with a young gentleman from Deposit—a dentist’s assistant—and had let him kiss her, and given him the flower from her hair. She loathed the thought of him now: she loathed all the people about her, and most of all the disdainful Miss Wincher. It enraged her to think that the Winchers classed her with the “hotel crew”—with the “belles” who awaited their Sunday young men. The place was forever blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed but thankful parents back to Apex.
But Miss Wincher’s depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest. She had heard the call of the Atlantic seaboard, and the next summer found the Spraggs at Skog Harbour, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare windbeaten inn, all shingles without and blueberry pie within, was “exclusive,” parochial, Bostonian; and the Spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation. The incomprehensible part of it was that every other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly—and most of them all three. If there had been any competition on ordinary lines Undine would have won, as Van Degen said, “hands down.” But there wasn’t—the other “guests” simply formed a cold impenetrable group who walked, boated, played golf, and discussed Christian Science and the Subliminal, unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their rock-bound circle.
It was on the day the Spraggs left Skog Harbour that Undine vowed to herself with set lips: “I’ll never try anything again till I try New York.” Now she had gained her point and tried New York, and so far, it seemed, with no better success. From small things to great, everything went against her. In such hours of self-searching she was ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes, but they exasperated her less than the blunders of her parents. She was sure, for instance, that she was on what Mrs. Heeny called “the right tack” at last: yet just at the moment when her luck seemed about to turn she was to be thwarted by her father’s stupid obstinacy about the opera-box…
She lay brooding over these things till long after Mrs. Spragg had gone away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o’clock when she heard her father’s dragging tread in the hall.
She kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her, laying aside his hat and overcoat; then his steps came close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book.
“Oh, father!” She sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her fingers twitching for the tickets. But a substantial packet emerged, like nothing she had ever seen. She looked at it, hoping, fearing—she beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile continued to tantalize her. Then she closed on him with a rush, smothering his words against her hair.
“It’s for more than one night—why, it’s for every other Friday! Oh, you darling, you darling!” she exulted.
Mr. Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. “That so? They must have given me the wrong—!” Then, convicted by her radiant eyes as she swung round on him: “I knew you only wanted it ONCE for yourself. Undine; but I thought maybe, off nights, you’d like to send it to your friends.”
Mrs. Spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this closing pleasantry, came forward as Undine hurried away to dress.
“Abner—can you really manage it all right?”
He answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. “Don’t you fret about that, Leota. I’m bound to have her go round with these people she knows. I want her to be with them all she can.”
A pause fell between them, while Mrs. Spragg looked anxiously into his fagged eyes.
“You seen Elmer again?”
“No. Once was enough,” he returned, with a scowl like Undine’s.
“Why—you SAID he couldn’t come after her, Abner!”
“No more he can. But what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and want to go after him?”
Mrs. Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. “How’d he look? Just the same?” she whispered.
“No. Spruced up. That’s what scared me.”
It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. “You look fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach drops right off,” she proposed.
But he parried this with his unfailing humour. “I guess I’m too sick to risk that.” He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture familiar to Apex City. “Come along down to dinner, mother—I guess Undine won’t mind if I don’t rig up tonight.”
V
She had looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony—she had looked up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semicircle whose privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that the curtain has fallen.
As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light into a centre.
It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent.
When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being able to name them—fixed figure-heads of the social prow—others she recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless.
Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not use it! What on earth could the people be doing—what