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.