The order is rapidly fading: A change in society in The Custom of the Country

Ralph Marvell, the beleaguered, has to actually work hard - not just to earn a living but to pamper his spoiled, selfish wife, Undine - interestingly, he takes a job in real estate - as a result of which they by a house way out on the West Side - today that looks pretty shrewd, but for Undine it's unfashionable and inconvenient. Hard to feel sorry for Ralph, in that he brought all this on himself because of his own naivete and stupidity, and so what if he has to work hard, most people do - and at much more unpleasant jobs - but he laments that he is giving up his literary and artistic ambitions. Maybe so, but they were no more than ambitions - he has never shown evidence of talent or devotion to art or writing. Meanwhile, the plot of Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country moves on ineluctably toward its doom: Undine, never satisfied with what Ralph can provide and completely indifferent to her child, begins succumbing to the advances of the unctuous, socially prominent, wealthy, married Peter van Deghan - in fact, she seems to take or borrow some money from him (the mechanics of this eluded me), putting her pretty much at his mercy - this an echo or foreshadowing of Lily Bart's humiliation and ruin in Mirth, but in this case without the attendant anti-Semitism. We can see that Undine is without values or scruples - and, at about 1/3 through the novel, it appears less likely that she will grow, learn from her experience (though not impossible); the focus is gradually shifting toward Ralph - how will he deal with his wife's transgressions? Will he break from from this marriage, or will it destroy him? On the margins of this plot are various insinuations by a minor character who apparently has some dirt of Undine and the Spragg family from their past days in Apex - probably her father's corrupt acquisition of land and wealth. This guy - can't recall his name - is a foreshadowing of the new age - people getting rich by skill and by guile, not by being born into the right family. Wharton herself is very aware of this - that she is writing about a world already in eclipse - that in part is the tragedy of Undine: she thought she was marrying into wealth and class, but that world is fading.