Chapter 23

In the Adirondacks Ralph Marvell sat day after day on the balcony of
his little house above the lake, staring at the great white
cloud-reflections in the water and at the dark line of trees that closed
them in. Now and then he got into the canoe and paddled himself through
a winding chain of ponds to some lonely clearing in the forest; and
there he lay on his back in the pine-needles and watched the great
clouds form and dissolve themselves above his head.

All his past life seemed to be symbolized by the building-up and
breaking-down of those fluctuating shapes, which incalculable
wind-currents perpetually shifted and remodelled or swept from the
zenith like a pinch of dust. His sister told him that he looked
well--better than he had in years; and there were moments when his
listlessness, his stony insensibility to the small pricks and frictions
of daily life, might have passed for the serenity of recovered health.

There was no one with whom he could speak of Undine. His family had
thrown over the whole subject a pall of silence which even Laura
Fairford shrank from raising. As for his mother, Ralph had seen at once
that the idea of talking over the situation was positively frightening
to her. There was no provision for such emergencies in the moral order
of Washington Square. The affair was a "scandal," and it was not in
the Dagonet tradition to acknowledge the existence of scandals. Ralph
recalled a dim memory of his childhood, the tale of a misguided friend
of his mother's who had left her husband for a more congenial companion,
and who, years later, returning ill and friendless to New York, had
appealed for sympathy to Mrs. Marvell. The latter had not refused to
give it; but she had put on her black cashmere and two veils when she
went to see her unhappy friend, and had never mentioned these errands of
mercy to her husband.

Ralph suspected that the constraint shown by his mother and sister was
partly due to their having but a dim and confused view of what had
happened. In their vocabulary the word "divorce" was wrapped in such a
dark veil of innuendo as no ladylike hand would care to lift. They had
not reached the point of differentiating divorces, but classed them
indistinctively as disgraceful incidents, in which the woman was always
to blame, but the man, though her innocent victim, was yet inevitably
contaminated. The time involved in the "proceedings" was viewed as a
penitential season during which it behoved the family of the persons
concerned to behave as if they were dead; yet any open allusion to the
reason for adopting such an attitude would have been regarded as the
height of indelicacy.

Mr. Dagonet's notion of the case was almost as remote from