de the
attempt it would be useless. Her father and mother seemed much older,
seemed tired and defeated, like herself.

Parents and daughter bore their common failure in a common silence,
broken only by Mrs. Spragg's occasional tentative allusions to her
grandson. But her anecdotes of Paul left a deeper silence behind them.
Undine did not want to talk of her boy. She could forget him when,
as she put it, things were "going her way," but in moments of
discouragement the thought of him was an added bitterness, subtly
different from her other bitter thoughts, and harder to quiet. It had
not occurred to her to try to gain possession of the child. She was
vaguely aware that the courts had given her his custody; but she had
never seriously thought of asserting this claim. Her parents' diminished
means and her own uncertain future made her regard the care of Paul as
an additional burden, and she quieted her scruples by thinking of him as
"better off" with Ralph's family, and of herself as rather touchingly
disinterested in putting his welfare before her own. Poor Mrs. Spragg
was pining for him, but Undine rejected her artless suggestion that Mrs.
Heeny should be sent to "bring him round." "I wouldn't ask them a favour
for the world--they're just waiting for a chance to be hateful to me,"
she scornfully declared; but it pained her that her boy, should be
so near, yet inaccessible, and for the first time she was visited by
unwonted questionings as to her share in the misfortunes that had
befallen her. She had voluntarily stepped out of her social frame, and
the only person on whom she could with any satisfaction have laid
the blame was the person to whom her mind now turned with a belated
tenderness. It was thus, in fact, that she thought of Ralph. His pride,
his reserve, all the secret expressions of his devotion, the tones of
his voice, his quiet manner, even his disconcerting irony: these seemed,
in contrast to what she had since known, the qualities essential to her
happiness. She could console herself only by regarding it as part of her
sad lot that poverty and the relentless animosity of his family, should
have put an end to so perfect a union: she gradually began to look on
herself and Ralph as the victims of dark machinations, and when she
mentioned him she spoke forgivingly, and implied that "everything might
have been different" if "people" had not "come between" them. She had
arrived in New York in midseason, and the d