The Custom of the Country | Page 6

Edith Wharton
door, calling imperiously down the passage:
"Celeste!" and adding, as the French maid appeared: "I want to look
over all my dinner-dresses."
Considering the extent of Miss Spragg's wardrobe her dinner-dresses
were not many. She had ordered a number the year before but, vexed at
her lack of use for them, had tossed them over impatiently to the maid.
Since then, indeed, she and Mrs. Spragg had succumbed to the abstract
pleasure of buying two or three more, simply because they were too
exquisite and Undine looked too lovely in them; but she had grown
tired of these also--tired of seeing them hang unworn in her wardrobe,
like so many derisive points of interrogation. And now, as Celeste
spread them out on the bed, they seemed disgustingly common-place,
and as familiar as if she had danced them to shreds. Nevertheless, she
yielded to the maid's persuasions and tried them on.
The first and second did not gain by prolonged inspection: they looked
old-fashioned already. "It's something about the sleeves," Undine
grumbled as she threw them aside.
The third was certainly the prettiest; but then it was the one she had
worn at the hotel dance the night before and the impossibility of
wearing it again within the week was too obvious for discussion. Yet
she enjoyed looking at herself in it, for it reminded her of her sparkling
passages with Claud Walsingham Popple, and her quieter but more
fruitful talk with his little friend--the young man she had hardly
noticed.
"You can go, Celeste--I'll take off the dress myself," she said: and when
Celeste had passed out, laden with discarded finery. Undine bolted her
door, dragged the tall pier-glass forward and, rummaging in a drawer
for fan and gloves, swept to a seat before the mirror with the air of a
lady arriving at an evening party. Celeste, before leaving, had drawn
down the blinds and turned on the electric light, and the white and gold
room, with its blazing wall-brackets, formed a sufficiently brilliant
background to carry out the illusion. So untempered a glare would have
been destructive to all half-tones and subtleties of modelling; but
Undine's beauty was as vivid, and almost as crude, as the brightness
suffusing it. Her black brows, her reddish-tawny hair and the pure red
and white of her complexion defied the searching decomposing
radiance: she might have been some fabled creature whose home was in

a beam of light.
Undine, as a child, had taken but a lukewarm interest in the diversions
of her playmates. Even in the early days when she had lived with her
parents in a ragged outskirt of Apex, and hung on the fence with
Indiana Frusk, the freckled daughter of the plumber "across the way,"
she had cared little for dolls or skipping-ropes, and still less for the
riotous games in which the loud Indiana played Atalanta to all the
boyhood of the quarter. Already Undine's chief delight was to "dress
up" in her mother's Sunday skirt and "play lady" before the wardrobe
mirror. The taste had outlasted childhood, and she still practised the
same secret pantomime, gliding in, settling her skirts, swaying her fan,
moving her lips in soundless talk and laughter; but lately she had
shrunk from everything that reminded her of her baffled social
yearnings. Now, however, she could yield without afterthought to the
joy of dramatizing her beauty. Within a few days she would be enacting
the scene she was now mimicking; and it amused her to see in advance
just what impression she would produce on Mrs. Fairford's guests.
For a while she carried on her chat with an imaginary circle of admirers,
twisting this way and that, fanning, fidgeting, twitching at her draperies,
as she did in real life when people were noticing her. Her incessant
movements were not the result of shyness: she thought it the correct
thing to be animated in society, and noise and restlessness were her
only notion of vivacity. She therefore watched herself approvingly,
admiring the light on her hair, the flash of teeth between her smiling
lips, the pure shadows of her throat and shoulders as she passed from
one attitude to another. Only one fact disturbed her: there was a hint of
too much fulness in the curves of her neck and in the spring of her hips.
She was tall enough to carry off a little extra weight, but excessive
slimness was the fashion, and she shuddered at the thought that she
might some day deviate from the perpendicular.
Presently she ceased to twist and sparkle at her image, and sinking into
her chair gave herself up to retrospection. She was vexed, in looking
back, to think how little notice she had taken of young Marvell, who
turned out to be so much less negligible
Continue reading on your phone by scaning this QR Code

 / 178
Tip: The current page has been bookmarked automatically. If you wish to continue reading later, just open the Dertz Homepage, and click on the 'continue reading' link at the bottom of the page.