Ralph suspected that the constraint shown by his mother and sister was partly due to their having but a dim and confused view of what had happened.  In their vocabulary the word “divorce” was wrapped in such a dark veil of innuendo as no ladylike hand would care to lift.  They had not reached the point of differentiating divorces, but classed them indistinctively as disgraceful incidents, in which the woman was always to blame, but the man, though her innocent victim, was yet inevitably contaminated.  The time involved in the “proceedings” was viewed as a penitential season during which it behoved the family of the persons concerned to behave as if they were dead; yet any open allusion to the reason for adopting such an attitude would have been regarded as the height of indelicacy.

Mr. Dagonet’s notion of the case was almost as remote from reality.  All he asked was that his grandson should “thrash” somebody, and he could not be made to understand that the modern drama of divorce is sometimes cast without a Lovelace.

“You might as well tell me there was nobody but Adam in the garden when Eve picked the apple.  You say your wife was discontented?  No woman ever knows she’s discontented till some man tells her so.  My God!  I’ve seen smash-ups before now; but I never yet saw a marriage dissolved like a business partnership.  Divorce without a lover?  Why, it’s—­it’s as unnatural as getting drunk on lemonade.”

After this first explosion Mr. Dagonet also became silent; and Ralph perceived that what annoyed him most was the fact of the “scandal’s” not being one in any gentlemanly sense of the word.  It was like some nasty business mess, about which Mr. Dagonet couldn’t pretend to have an opinion, since such things didn’t happen to men of his kind.  That such a thing should have happened to his only grandson was probably the bitterest experience of his pleasantly uneventful life; and it added a touch of irony to Ralph’s unhappiness to know how little, in the whole affair, he was cutting the figure Mr. Dagonet expected him to cut.

At first he had chafed under the taciturnity surrounding him:  had passionately longed to cry out his humiliation, his rebellion, his despair.  Then he began to feel the tonic effect of silence; and the next stage was reached when it became clear to him that there was nothing to say.  There were thoughts and thoughts:  they bubbled up perpetually from the black springs of his hidden misery, they stole on him in the darkness of night, they blotted out the light of day; but when it came to putting them into words and applying them to the external facts of the case, they seemed totally unrelated to it.  One more white and sun-touched glory had gone from his sky; but there seemed no way of connecting that with such practical issues as his being called on to decide whether Paul was to be put in knickerbockers or trousers, and whether he should go back to Washington Square for the winter or hire a small house for himself and his son.