Chapter 21

The spring in New York proceeded through more than its usual extremes of
temperature to the threshold of a sultry June.

Ralph Marvell, wearily bent to his task, felt the fantastic humours of
the weather as only one more incoherence in the general chaos of his
case. It was strange enough, after four years of marriage, to find
himself again in his old brown room in Washington Square. It was
hardly there that he had expected Pegasus to land him; and, like a man
returning to the scenes of his childhood, he found everything on a much
smaller scale than he had imagined. Had the Dagonet boundaries really
narrowed, or had the breach in the walls of his own life let in a wider
vision?

Certainly there had come to be other differences between his present and
his former self than that embodied in the presence of his little boy in
the next room. Paul, in fact, was now the chief link between Ralph and
his past. Concerning his son he still felt and thought, in a general
way, in the terms of the Dagonet tradition; he still wanted to implant
in Paul some of the reserves and discriminations which divided that
tradition from the new spirit of limitless concession. But for himself
it was different. Since his transaction with Moffatt he had had the
sense of living under a new dispensation. He was not sure that it was
any worse than the other; but then he was no longer very sure about
anything. Perhaps this growing indifference was merely the reaction from
a long nervous strain: that his mother and sister thought it so was
shown by the way in which they mutely watched and hovered. Their
discretion was like the hushed tread about a sick-bed. They permitted
themselves no criticism of Undine; he was asked no awkward questions,
subjected to no ill-timed sympathy. They simply took him back, on his
own terms, into the life he had left them to; and their silence had none
of those subtle implications of disapproval which may be so much more
wounding than speech.

For a while he received a weekly letter from Undine. Vague and
disappointing though they were, these missives helped him through the
days; but he looked forward to them rather as a pretext for replies than
for their actual contents. Undine was never at a loss for the spoken
word: Ralph had often wondered at her verbal range and her fluent use of
terms outside the current vocabulary. She had certainly not picked these
up in books, since she never opened one: they seemed rather like some
odd transmission of her preaching grandparent's oratory. But in her
brief and colourless letters she repeated the same bald statements in
the same few terms. She was well, she had been "round" with Bertha
Shallum, she had dined with the Jim Driscolls or May Beringer or Dicky