The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton Read Free Book Online Page B

Virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of Miss Wincher’s conversation with the newcomer, Undine, straining her ears behind a column of the long verandah, obtained a new glimpse into the unimagined.
    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 doubtit 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 dining-room, 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 wind-beaten 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’ simplyformed 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