Chapter 17

Nothing was bitterer to her than to confess to herself the failure of
her power; but her last talk with Van Degen had taught her a lesson
almost worth the abasement. She saw the mistake she had made in taking
money from him, and understood that if she drifted into repeating that
mistake her future would be irretrievably compromised. What she wanted
was not a hand-to-mouth existence of precarious intrigue: to one with
her gifts the privileges of life should come openly. Already in her
short experience she had seen enough of the women who sacrifice future
security for immediate success, and she meant to lay solid foundations
before she began to build up the light super-structure of enjoyment.

Nevertheless it was galling to see Van Degen leave, and to know that for
the time he had broken away from her. Over a nature so insensible to the
spells of memory, the visible and tangible would always prevail. If she
could have been with him again in Paris, where, in the shining spring
days, every sight and sound ministered to such influences, she was sure
she could have regained her hold. And the sense of frustration was
intensified by the fact that every one she knew was to be there: her
potential rivals were crowding the east-bound steamers. New York was a
desert, and Ralph's seeming unconsciousness of the fact increased her
resentment. She had had but one chance at Europe since her marriage, and
that had been wasted through her husband's unaccountable perversity. She
knew now with what packed hours of Paris and London they had paid for
their empty weeks in Italy.

Meanwhile the long months of the New York spring stretched out before
her in all their social vacancy to the measureless blank of a summer in
the Adirondacks. In her girlhood she had plumbed the dim depths of such
summers; but then she had been sustained by the hope of bringing some
capture to the surface. Now she knew better: there were no "finds" for
her in that direction. The people she wanted would be at Newport or
in Europe, and she was too resolutely bent on a definite object, too
sternly animated by her father's business instinct, to turn aside in
quest of casual distractions.

The chief difficulty in the way of her attaining any distant end had
always been her reluctance to plod through the intervening stretches
of dulness and privation. She had begun to see this, but she could not
always master the weakness: never had she stood in greater need of
Mrs. Heeny's "Go slow. Undine!" Her imagination was incapable of long
flights. She could not cheat her impatience with the mirage of far-off
satisfactions, and for the moment present and future seemed equally
void. But her desire to go to Europe and to rejoin the little New York