Chapter 6 - Page 2

light foot had reached the threshold. His cousin Clare
Dagonet, for instance: there had been a summer when her voice had
sounded far down the windings... but he had run over to Spain for the
autumn, and when he came back she was engaged to Peter Van Degen, and
for a while it looked black in the cave. That was long ago, as time is
reckoned under thirty; and for three years now he had felt for her only
a half-contemptuous pity. To have stood at the mouth of his cave, and
have turned from it to the Van Degen lair--!

Poor Clare repented, indeed--she wanted it clearly but she repented in
the Van Degen diamonds, and the Van Degen motor bore her broken heart
from opera to ball. She had been subdued to what she worked in, and she
could never again find her way to the enchanted cave... Ralph, since
then, had reached the point of deciding that he would never marry;
reached it not suddenly or dramatically, but with such sober advisedness
as is urged on those about to take 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