XXVI

The next phase in the unrolling vision was the episode of her return to New York.  She had gone to the Malibran, to her parents—­for it was a moment in her career when she clung passionately to the conformities, and when the fact of being able to say:  “I’m here with my father and mother” was worth paying for even in the discomfort of that grim abode.  Nevertheless, it was another thorn in her pride that her parents could not—­for the meanest of material reasons—­transfer themselves at her coming to one of the big Fifth Avenue hotels.  When she had suggested it Mr. Spragg had briefly replied that, owing to the heavy expenses of her divorce suit, he couldn’t for the moment afford anything better; and this announcement cast a deeper gloom over the future.

It was not an occasion for being “nervous,” however; she had learned too many hard facts in the last few months to think of having recourse to her youthful methods.  And something told her that if she made the attempt it would be useless.  Her father and mother seemed much older, seemed tired and defeated, like herself.

Parents and daughter bore their common failure in a common silence, broken only by Mrs. Spragg’s occasional tentative allusions to her grandson.  But her anecdotes of Paul left a deeper silence behind them.  Undine did not want to talk of her boy.  She could forget him when, as she put it, things were “going her way,” but in moments of discouragement the thought of him was an added bitterness, subtly different from her other bitter thoughts, and harder to quiet.  It had not occurred to her to try to gain possession of the child.  She was vaguely aware that the courts had given her his custody; but she had never seriously thought of asserting this claim.  Her parents’ diminished means and her own uncertain future made her regard the care of Paul as an additional burden, and she quieted her scruples by thinking of him as “better off” with Ralph’s family, and of herself as rather touchingly disinterested in putting his welfare before her own.  Poor Mrs. Spragg was pining for him, but Undine rejected her artless suggestion that Mrs. Heeny should be sent to “bring him round.”  “I wouldn’t ask them a favour for the world—­they’re just waiting for a chance to be hateful to me,” she scornfully declared; but it pained her that her boy, should be so near, yet inaccessible, and for the first time she was visited by unwonted questionings as to her share in the misfortunes that had befallen her.  She had voluntarily stepped out of her social frame, and the only person on whom she could with any satisfaction have laid the blame was the person to whom her mind now turned with a belated tenderness.  It was thus, in fact, that she thought of Ralph.  His pride, his reserve, all the secret expressions of his devotion, the tones of his voice, his quiet manner, even his disconcerting irony:  these seemed, in contrast to what she had since known,