The Custom of the Country Read Online Free PDF Page A

like pictures of ‘Back to the farm for Christmas’; and when the logs fell forward Mrs Fairford or her brother had to jump up to push them in place, and the ashes scattered over the hearth untidily.
    The dinner too was disappointing. Undine was too young to take note of culinary details, but she had expected to view the company through a bower of orchids and eat pretty-coloured
entrées
in ruffled papers. Instead, there was only a low centre-dish of ferns, and plain roasted and broiled meat that one could recognize – as if they’d been dyspeptics on a diet! With all the hints in the Sunday papers, she thought it dull of Mrs Fairford not to have picked up something newer; and as the evening progressed she began to suspect that it wasn’t a real ‘dinner-party’, and that they had just asked her in to share what they had when they were alone.
    But a glance about the table convinced her that Mrs Fairford could not have meant to treat her other guests so lightly. They were only eight in number, but one was no less a person than young Mrs Peter Van Degen – the one who had been a Dagonet – and the consideration which this young lady, herself one of the choicest ornaments of the Society Column, displayed toward the rest of the company, convinced Undine that they must be more important than they looked. She liked Mrs Fairford, a small incisive woman, with a big nose and good teeth revealed by frequent smiles. In her dowdy black and antiquated ornaments she was not what Undine would have called ‘stylish’; but she had a droll kind way which reminded the girl of her father’s manner when he was not tired or worried about money. One of the other ladies, having white hair, did not long arrest Undine’s attention; and the fourth, a girl like herself, who was introduced as Miss Harriet Ray, she dismissed at a glance as plain and wearing a last year’s ‘model’. The men, too, were less striking than she had hoped. She had not expected much of Mr Fairford, since married men were intrinsically uninteresting, and his baldness and grey moustache seemed naturally to relegate him to the background; but she had looked for some brilliant youths of her own age – in her inmost heart she had looked for Mr Popple. He was not there, however, and of the other men one, whom they called Mr Bowen, was hopelessly elderly – she supposed he was the husband of the white-haired lady – andthe other two, who seemed to be friends of young Marvell’s, were both lacking in Claud Walsingham’s dash.
    Undine sat between Mr Bowen and young Marvell, who struck her as very ‘sweet’ (it was her word for friendliness), but even shyer than at the hotel dance. Yet she was not sure if he were shy, or if his quietness were only a new kind of self-possession which expressed itself negatively instead of aggressively. Small, well-knit, fair, he sat stroking his slight blond moustache and looking at her with kindly, almost tender eyes; but he left it to his sister and the others to draw her out and fit her into the pattern.
    Mrs Fairford talked so well that the girl wondered why Mrs Heeny had found her lacking in conversation. But though Undine thought silent people awkward she was not easily impressed by verbal fluency. All the ladies in Apex City were more voluble than Mrs Fairford, and had a larger vocabulary: the difference was that with Mrs Fairford conversation seemed to be a concert and not a solo. She kept drawing in the others, giving each a turn, beating time for them with her smile, and somehow harmonizing and linking together what they said. She took particular pains to give Undine her due part in the performance; but the girl’s expansive impulses were always balanced by odd reactions of mistrust, and tonight the latter prevailed. She meant to watch and listen without letting herself go, and she sat very straight and pink, answering promptly but briefly, with the nervous laugh that punctuated all her phrases – saying ‘I don’t care