the opposite step.  What he most wanted, now that the first flutter of being was over, was to learn and to do—­to know what the great people had thought, think about their thinking, and then launch his own boat:  write some good verse if possible; if not, then critical prose.  A dramatic poem lay among the stuff at his elbow; but the prose critic was at his elbow too, and not to be satisfied about the poem; and poet and critic passed the nights in hot if unproductive debate.  On the whole, it seemed likely that the critic would win the day, and the essay on “The Rhythmical Structures of Walt Whitman” take shape before “The Banished God.”  Yet if the light in the cave was less supernaturally blue, the chant of its tides less laden with unimaginable music, it was still a thronged and echoing place when Undine Spragg appeared on its threshold...

His mother and sister of course wanted him to marry.  They had the usual theory that he was “made” for conjugal bliss:  women always thought that of a fellow who didn’t get drunk and have low tastes.  Ralph smiled at the idea as he sat crouched among his secret treasures.  Marry—­but whom, in the name of light and freedom?  The daughters of his own race sold themselves to the Invaders; the daughters of the Invaders bought their husbands as they bought an opera-box.  It ought all to have been transacted on the Stock Exchange.  His mother, he knew, had no such ambitions for him:  she would have liked him to fancy a “nice girl” like Harriet Ray.

Harriet Ray was neither vulgar nor ambitious.  She regarded Washington Square as the birthplace of Society, knew by heart all the cousinships of early New York, hated motor-cars, could not make herself understood on the telephone, and was determined, if she married, never to receive a divorced woman.  As Mrs. Marvell often said, such girls as Harriet were growing rare.  Ralph was not sure about this.  He was inclined to think that, certain modifications allowed for, there would always be plenty of Harriet Rays for unworldly mothers to commend to their sons; and he had no desire to diminish their number by removing one from the ranks of the marriageable.  He had no desire to marry at all—­that had been the whole truth of it till he met Undine Spragg.  And now—?  He lit a cigar, and began to recall his hour’s conversation with Mrs. Spragg.

Ralph had never taken his mother’s social faiths very seriously.  Surveying the march of civilization from a loftier angle, he had early mingled with the Invaders, and curiously observed their rites and customs.  But most of those he had met had already been modified by contact with the indigenous:  they spoke the same language as his, though on their lips it had often so different a meaning.  Ralph had never seen them actually in the making, before they had acquired the speech of the conquered race.  But Mrs. Spragg still used the dialect of her people, and before the end of the visit Ralph had ceased to regret that her daughter was out.  He felt obscurely that in the girl’s presence—­frank and simple as he thought her—­he should have learned less of life in early Apex.