The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton Page A

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 rarer delight could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes and the names oftheir owners were given on the back of the programme, and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays and Fridays, Mrs Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty because Mrs Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! ‘
Peter will be at one of his club dinners.
’ Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen dining-room – she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding – with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and Ralph Marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to take a light from his hostess’s cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction, and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the glitter of jewels on Mrs Van Degen’s bare shoulders to the way young Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened.
    Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had been ‘taken’ by her – that she could ever really count among these happy self-absorbed people! They all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an intruder in a circle so packed with the initiated?
    As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere. She remembered that an eminent divine was preaching a series of sermons against Social Corruption, and she determined to go and hear him on the following Sunday.
    This train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being intently observed from the neighbouring box. She turned around with a feint of speaking to Mrs Lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of Peter Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely set brilliants, which, at a word from her companion, she critically bent on Undine.
    ‘No – I don’t remember,’ she said; and the girl reddened,divining herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny.
    But there was no doubt as to young Van Degen’s remembering her. She was even conscious that he was trying to provoke in her some reciprocal sign of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her programme.
    ‘Why, there’s Mr Popple over there!’ exclaimed Mabel Lipscomb, making large signs across the house with fan and playbill.
    Undine had already become aware that Mabel, planted, blonde and brimming, too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way: a gesture-less mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. Still, Undine could not help following Mrs Lipscomb’s glance, and there in fact was Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and bending easily over what she felt must be the back of a brilliant woman.
    He replied by a discreet salute to Mrs Lipscomb’s intemperate motions, and Undine saw the brilliant woman’s opera-glass turn in their direction, and said to herself that in a moment Mr Popple would be ’round’. But the