The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton Page B

more assurance. Her confidence in her beauty had hitherto carried her through everyordeal; and it was fortified now by the feeling of power that came with the sense of being loved. If they would only leave her mother out she was sure, in her own phrase, of being able to ‘run the thing’; and Mrs Spragg had providentially been left out of the Dagonet dinner.
    It was to consist, it appeared, only of the small family group Undine had already met; and, seated at old Mr Dagonet’s right, in the high dark dining-room with mahogany doors and dim portraits of ‘Signers’ and their females, she felt a conscious joy in her ascendancy. Old Mr Dagonet – small, frail and softly sardonic – appeared to fall at once under her spell. If she felt, beneath his amenity, a kind of delicate dangerousness, like that of some fine surgical instrument, she ignored it as unimportant; for she had as yet no clear perception of forces that did not directly affect her.
    Mrs Marvell, low-voiced, faded, yet impressive, was less responsive to her arts, and Undine divined in her the head of the opposition to Ralph’s marriage. Mrs Heeny had reported that Mrs Marvell had other views for her son; and this was confirmed by such echoes of the short sharp struggle as reached the throbbing listeners at the Stentorian. But the conflict over, the air had immediately cleared, showing the enemy in the act of unconditional surrender. It surprised Undine that there had been no reprisals, no return on the points conceded. That was not her idea of warfare, and she could ascribe the completeness of the victory only to the effect of her charms.
    Mrs Marvell’s manner did not express entire subjugation; yet she seemed anxious to dispel any doubts of her good faith, and if she left the burden of the talk to her lively daughter it might have been because she felt more capable of showing indulgence by her silence than in her speech.
    As for Mrs Fairford, she had never seemed more brilliantly bent on fusing the various elements under her hand. Undine had already discovered that she adored her brother, and had guessed that this would make her either a strong ally or a determined enemy. The latter alternative, however, did notalarm the girl. She thought Mrs Fairford ‘bright’, and wanted to be liked by her; and she was in the state of dizzy self-assurance when it seemed easy to win any sympathy she chose to seek.
    For the only other guests – Mrs Fairford’s husband, and the elderly Charles Bowen who seemed to be her special friend – Undine had no attention to spare: they remained on a plane with the dim pictures hanging at her back. She had expected a larger party; but she was relieved, on the whole, that it was small enough to permit of her dominating it. Not that she wished to do so by any loudness of assertion. Her quickness in noting external differences had already taught her to modulate and lower her voice, and to replace ‘The
i
dea!’ and ‘I wouldn’t wonder’ by more polished locutions; and she had not been ten minutes at table before she found that to seem very much in love, and a little confused and subdued by the newness and intensity of the sentiment, was, to the Dagonet mind, the becoming attitude for a young lady in her situation. The part was not hard to play, for she
was
in love, of course. It was pleasant, when she looked across the table, to meet Ralph’s grey eyes, with that new look in them, and to feel that she had kindled it; but it was only part of her larger pleasure in the general homage to her beauty, in the sensations of interest and curiosity excited by everything about her, from the family portraits overhead to the old Dagonet silver on the table – which were to be hers too, after all!
    The talk, as at Mrs Fairford’s, confused her by its lack of the personal allusion, its tendency to turn to books, pictures and politics. ‘Politics’, to Undine, had always been like a kind of back-kitchen to business – the place where