Meanwhile the long months of the New York spring stretched out before her in all their social vacancy to the measureless blank of a summer in the Adirondacks.  In her girlhood she had plumbed the dim depths of such summers; but then she had been sustained by the hope of bringing some capture to the surface.  Now she knew better:  there were no “finds” for her in that direction.  The people she wanted would be at Newport or in Europe, and she was too resolutely bent on a definite object, too sternly animated by her father’s business instinct, to turn aside in quest of casual distractions.

The chief difficulty in the way of her attaining any distant end had always been her reluctance to plod through the intervening stretches of dulness and privation.  She had begun to see this, but she could not always master the weakness:  never had she stood in greater need of Mrs. Heeny’s “Go slow.  Undine!” Her imagination was incapable of long flights.  She could not cheat her impatience with the mirage of far-off satisfactions, and for the moment present and future seemed equally void.  But her desire to go to Europe and to rejoin the little New York world that was reforming itself in London and Paris was fortified by reasons which seemed urgent enough to justify an appeal to her father.

She went down to his office to plead her case, fearing Mrs. Spragg’s intervention.  For some time past Mr. Spragg had been rather continuously overworked, and the strain was beginning to tell on him.  He had never quite regained, in New York, the financial security of his Apex days.  Since he had changed his base of operations his affairs had followed an uncertain course, and Undine suspected that his breach with his old political ally, the Representative Rolliver who had seen him through the muddiest reaches of the Pure Water Move, was not unconnected with his failure to get a footing in Wall Street.  But all this was vague and shadowy to her Even had “business” been less of a mystery, she was too much absorbed in her own affairs to project herself into her father’s case; and she thought she was sacrificing enough to delicacy of feeling in sparing him the “bother” of Mrs. Spragg’s opposition.  When she came to him with a grievance he always heard her out with the same mild patience; but the long habit of “managing” him had made her, in his own language, “discount” this tolerance, and when she ceased to speak her heart throbbed with suspense as he leaned back, twirling an invisible toothpick under his sallow moustache.  Presently he raised a hand to stroke the limp beard in which the moustache was merged; then he groped for the Masonic emblem that had lost itself in one of the folds of his depleted waistcoat.

He seemed to fish his answer from the same rusty depths, for as his fingers closed about the trinket he said:  “Yes, the heated term is trying in New York.  That’s why the Fresh Air Fund pulled my last dollar out of me last week.”