Free The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton Page B

epidemic which devastated Apex before the new water-works were built; and thiscalamity, by causing Mr Spragg to resolve that thereafter Apex should drink pure water, had led directly to the founding of his fortunes.
    ‘He had taken over some of poor father’s land for a bad debt, and when he got up the Pure Water Move the company voted to buy the land and build the new reservoir up there: and after that we began to be better off, and it
did
seem as if it had come out so to comfort us some about the children.’
    Mr Spragg, thereafter, had begun to be a power in Apex, and fat years had followed on the lean. Ralph Marvell was too little versed in affairs to read between the lines of Mrs Spragg’s untutored narrative, and he understood no more than she the occult connection between Mr Spragg’s domestic misfortunes and his business triumph. Mr Spragg had ‘helped out’ his ruined father-in-law, and had vowed on his children’s graves that no Apex child should ever again drink poisoned water – and out of those two disinterested impulses, by some impressive law of compensation, material prosperity had come. What Ralph understood and appreciated was Mrs Spragg’s unaffected frankness in talking of her early life. Here was no retrospective pretence of an opulent past, such as the other Invaders were given to parading before the bland but undeceived subject race. The Spraggs had been ‘plain people’ and had not yet learned to be ashamed of it. The fact drew them much closer to the Dagonet ideals than any sham elegance in the past tense. Ralph felt that his mother, who shuddered away from Mrs Harmon B. Driscoll, would understand and esteem Mrs Spragg.
    But how long would their virgin innocence last? Popple’s vulgar hands were on it already – Popple’s and the unspeakable Van Degen’s! Once they and theirs had begun the process of initiating Undine, there was no knowing – or rather there was too easy knowing – how it would end! It was incredible that she too should be destined to swell the ranks of the cheaply fashionable; yet were not her very freshness, her malleability, the mark of her fate? She was still at the age when the flexible soul offers itself to the first grasp.That the grasp should chance to be Van Degen’s – that was what made Ralph’s temples buzz, and swept away all his plans for his own future like a beaver’s dam in a spring flood. To save her from Van Degen and Van Degenism: was that really to be his mission – the ‘call’ for which his life had obscurely waited? It was not in the least what he had meant to do with the fugitive flash of consciousness he called self; but all that he had purposed for that transitory being sank into insignificance under the pressure of Undine’s claims.
    Ralph Marvell’s notion of women had been formed on the experiences common to good-looking young men of his kind. Women were drawn to him as much by his winning appealing quality, by the sense of a youthful warmth behind his light ironic exterior, as by his charms of face and mind. Except during Clare Dagonet’s brief reign the depths in him had not been stirred; but in taking what each sentimental episode had to give he had preserved, through all his minor adventures, his faith in the great adventure to come. It was this faith that made him so easy a victim when love had at last appeared clad in the attributes of romance: the imaginative man’s indestructible dream of a rounded passion.
    The clearness with which he judged the girl and himself seemed the surest proof that his feeling was more than a surface thrill. He was not blind to her crudity and her limitations, but they were a part of her grace and her persuasion.
Diverse et ondoyante –
so he had seen her from the first. But was not that merely the sign of a quicker response to the world’s manifold appeal? There was Harriet Ray, sealed up tight in the vacuum of inherited opinion, where not a breath of fresh sensation could get at her: there