The Custom of the Country

by Edith Wharton

She had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choicer fare.

Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes?

What on earth could the people be doing—what rarer delight could they be tasting?

the instinct of sex told her that, under his quiet words, he was throbbing with the sense of her proximity.

Mr. Spragg, thereafter, had begun to be a power in Apex, and fat years had followed on the lean.

She was still at the age when the flexible soul offers itself to the first grasp.

There was Harriet Ray, sealed up tight in the vacuum of inherited opinion, where not a breath of fresh sensation could get at her:

The winter twilight was deliriously cold, and as they swept through Central Park, and gathered impetus for their northward flight along the darkening Boulevard, Undine felt the rush of physical joy that drowns scruples and silences memory.

her impatience to enjoy was curbed by an instinct for holding off and biding her time that resembled the patient skill with which her father had conducted the sale of his "bad" real estate in the Pure Water Move days. But now and then youth had its way—she could not always resist the present pleasure.

"Where's the victim of my vulgarity? Let me crush him under the weight of my gold."

disquietude

the close contact of covetous impulses,

What could be more delightful than to feel that, while all the women envied her dress, the men did not so much as look at it? Their admiration was all for herself, and her beauty deepened under it as flowers take a warmer colour in the rays of sunset.

Her imagination was incapable of long flights.

The fact was characteristic. Under all his incalculableness there had always been a hard foundation of reliability: it seemed to be a matter of choice with him whether he let one feel that solid bottom or not.

but to-night she seemed to have been brushed by the wing of poetry, and its shadow lingered in her eyes.

"The wife? She's married? There, again, it's so puzzling! Your young girls look so experienced, and your married women sometimes so—unmarried."

but her silence was obviously the criticism of a superior mind.

Of what use were youth and grace and good looks, if one drop of poison distilled from the envy of a narrow-minded woman was enough to paralyze them?

anthropophagi.