Chapter 23 - Page 2

reality. All
he asked was that his grandson should "thrash" somebody, and he could
not be made to understand that the modern drama of divorce is sometimes
cast without a Lovelace.

"You might as well tell me there was nobody but Adam in the garden when
Eve picked the apple. You say your wife was discontented? No woman ever
knows she's discontented till some man tells her so. My God! I've seen
smash-ups before now; but I never yet saw a marriage dissolved like
a business partnership. Divorce without a lover? Why, it's--it's as
unnatural as getting drunk on lemonade."

After this first explosion Mr. Dagonet also became silent; and Ralph
perceived that what annoyed him most was the fact of the "scandal's" not
being one in any gentlemanly sense of the word. It was like some nasty
business mess, about which Mr. Dagonet couldn't pretend to have an
opinion, since such things didn't happen to men of his kind. That such
a thing should have happened to his only grandson was probably the
bitterest experience of his pleasantly uneventful life; and it added a
touch of irony to Ralph's unhappiness to know how little, in the whole
affair, he was cutting the figure Mr. Dagonet expected him to cut.

At first he had chafed under the taciturnity surrounding him: had
passionately longed to cry out his humiliation, his rebellion, his
despair. Then he began to feel the tonic effect of silence; and the next
stage was reached when it became clear to him that there was nothing to
say. There were thoughts and thoughts: they bubbled up perpetually
from the black springs of his hidden misery, they stole on him in the
darkness of night, they blotted out the light of day; but when it came
to putting them into words and applying them to the external facts
of the case, they seemed totally unrelated to it. One more white and
sun-touched glory had gone from his sky; but there seemed no way of
connecting that with such practical issues as his being called on to
decide whether Paul was to be put in knickerbockers or trousers, and
whether he should go back to Washington Square for the winter or hire a
small house for himself and his son.

The latter question was ultimately decided by his remaining under his
grandfather's roof. November found him back in the office again, in
fairly good health, with an outer skin of indifference slowly forming
over his lacerated soul. There had been a hard minute to live through
when he came back to his old brown room in Washington Square. The walls
and tables were covered with photographs of Undine: effigies of all
shapes and sizes, expressing every possible sentiment dear to the
photographic tradition. Ralph had gathered them all up when he had moved
from West