The Custom of the Country

by Edith Wharton

All was blurred and puzzling to the girl in this world of half-lights, halftones, eliminations and abbreviations; and she felt a violent longing to brush away the cobwebs and assert herself as the dominant figure of the scene.

The daughters of his own race sold themselves to the Invaders; the daughters of the Invaders bought their husbands as they bought an opera-box. It ought all to have been transacted on the Stock Exchange.

Poor Undine! She was what the gods had made her—a creature of skin-deep reactions, a mote in the beam of pleasure.

During the interval between her divorce and her remarriage she had learned what things cost, but not how to do without them; and money still seemed to her like some mysterious and uncertain stream which occasionally vanished underground but was sure to bubble up again at one’s feet.

But it was impossible for Undine to understand a social organization which did not regard the indulging of woman as its first purpose, or to believe that any one taking another view was not moved by avarice or malice;

Undine’s estimate of people had always been based on their apparent power of getting what they wanted—provided it came under the category of things she understood wanting.

She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.