His partners were quick to profit by his sudden spurt of energy, and his work grew no lighter.  He was not only the youngest and most recent member of the firm, but the one who had so far added least to the volume of its business.  His hours were the longest, his absences, as summer approached, the least frequent and the most grudgingly accorded.  No doubt his associates knew that he was pressed for money and could not risk a break.  They “worked” him, and he was aware of it, and submitted because he dared not lose his job.  But the long hours of mechanical drudgery were telling on his active body and undisciplined nerves.  He had begun too late to subject himself to the persistent mortification of spirit and flesh which is a condition of the average business life; and after the long dull days in the office the evenings at his grandfather’s whist-table did not give him the counter-stimulus he needed.

Almost every one had gone out of town; but now and then Miss Ray came to dine, and Ralph, seated beneath the family portraits and opposite the desiccated Harriet, who had already faded to the semblance of one of her own great-aunts, listened languidly to the kind of talk that the originals might have exchanged about the same table when New York gentility centred in the Battery and the Bowling Green.  Mr. Dagonet was always pleasant to see and hear, but his sarcasms were growing faint and recondite:  they had as little bearing on life as the humours of a Restoration comedy.  As for Mrs. Marvell and Miss Ray, they seemed to the young man even more spectrally remote:  hardly anything that mattered to him existed for them, and their prejudices reminded him of sign-posts warning off trespassers who have long since ceased to intrude.

Now and then he dined at his club and went on to the theatre with some young men of his own age; but he left them afterward, half vexed with himself for not being in the humour to prolong the adventure.  There were moments when he would have liked to affirm his freedom in however commonplace a way:  moments when the vulgarest way would have seemed the most satisfying.  But he always ended by walking home alone and tip-toeing upstairs through the sleeping house lest he should wake his boy....

On Saturday afternoons, when the business world was hurrying to the country for golf and tennis, he stayed in town and took Paul to see the Spraggs.  Several times since his wife’s departure he had tried to bring about closer relations between his own family and Undine’s; and the ladies of Washington Square, in their eagerness to meet his wishes, had made various friendly advances to Mrs. Spragg.  But they were met by a mute resistance which made Ralph suspect that Undine’s strictures on his family had taken root in her mother’s brooding mind; and he gave up the struggle to bring together what had been so effectually put asunder.