The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton

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 Ithought 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
    S HE 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 semi-circle whose privilege itis, 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