The Custom of the Country

f wandering and rich initiation. Returning to New York, he had read law, and now had his desk in the office of the respectable firm

es; sketches too--he could do charming things, if only he had known how to finish them!--and, on the writing-ta

ia or Harvard, read law, and then lapse into more or less cultivated inaction. The only essential was that he should live "like a gentleman"--that is, with a tranquil disdain for mere money-getting,

buy books (not "editions"), and pay now and then for a holiday dash to the great centres of art and ideas. And meanwhile there was the world of wonders within him. As a boy at the sea-side, Ralph, between tides, had once come on a cave--a secret inaccessible place with glaucous lights, mysterious murmurs, and a single shaft of communication with the sky. He h

. Once or twice already a light foot had reached the threshold. His cousin Clare Dagonet, for instance: there had been a summer when her voice had sounded far down the windings... but he had run over to Spain for the autumn, and when he came back she was engaged to Peter

n those about to take the opposite step. What he most wanted, now that the first flutter of being was over, was to learn and to do--to know what the great people had thought, think about their thinking, and then launch his own boat: write some good verse if possible; if not, then critical prose. A dramatic poem lay among the stuff at his elbow; but the prose critic was at his elbow too, and not to be satisfied about the poem; and p

the idea as he sat crouched among his secret treasures. Marry--but whom, in the name of light and freedom? The daughters of his own race sold themselves to the Invaders; the daughters of the Invaders bought their h

e a divorced woman. As Mrs. Marvell often said, such girls as Harriet were growing rare. Ralph was not sure about this. He was inclined to think that, certain modifications allowed for, there would always be plenty of Harriet Rays for unworldly mothers to commend to their sons; an

odified by contact with the indigenous: they spoke the same language as his, though on their lips it had often so different a meaning. Ralph had never seen them actually in the making, before they had acquired the speech of the conquered race. But Mrs. Sprag

of divers et ondoyant in his brain, had repeated her daughter's name after her, saying: "It's a wonderful find--how could you tell it would be such a fit?"--it came to her quite easily to answer: "Why, we called her after a hair-waver father put on the market the week she was born--" and then to explain, as he remained struck and silent: "It's from UNdoolay, you know, the French for crimping; father always thought the name made it take. He was quite a scholar, and had the greatest knack for finding names. I remember the time he invented his Goliath Glue he sat up all night over the Bible to get the name... No, father didn't start IN as a druggist," she w

a protracted struggle, darkened by domestic affliction. Two of their three children had died of typhoid in the epidemic which devastated Apex before the new water-w

ve the company voted to buy the land and build the new reservoir up there: and after that we began

aw, and had vowed on his children's graves that no Apex child should ever again drink poisoned water--and out of those two disinterested impulses, by some impressive law of compensation, material prosperity had come. What Ralph understood and appreciated was Mrs. Spragg's unaffected frankness in talking of her early life. Here was no retrospective pretense of an opulent past, such

heaply fashionable; yet were not her very freshness, her malleability, the mark of her fate? She was still at the age when the flexible soul offers itself to the first grasp. That the grasp should chance to be Van Degen's--that was what made Ralph's temples buzz, and swept away all his plans for his own future like a beaver's dam in a spring flood. T

ronic exterior, as by his charms of face and mind. Except during Clare Dagonet's brief reign the depths in him had not been stirred; but in taking what each sentimental episode had to give he had preserved, through all his minor ad

ht in the vacuum of inherited opinion, where not a breath of fresh sensation could get at her: there could be no call to rescue young ladies so secured from the perils of reality! Undine had no such traditional safeguards--Ralph guessed Mrs. Spragg's opinions to be as fluid as her daughter's--and the girl's very sensitiveness to new impressions, combined with her obvious lack of any sense of relative values, woul