Undine frowned:  there was nothing more irritating, in these encounters with her father, than his habit of opening the discussion with a joke.

“I wish you’d understand that I’m serious, father.  I’ve never been strong since the baby was born, and I need a change.  But it’s not only that:  there are other reasons for my wanting to go.”

Mr. Spragg still held to his mild tone of banter.  “I never knew you short on reasons, Undie.  Trouble is you don’t always know other people’s when you see ’em.”

His daughter’s lips tightened.  “I know your reasons when I see them, father:  I’ve heard them often enough.  But you can’t know mine because I haven’t told you—­not the real ones.”

“Jehoshaphat!  I thought they were all real as long as you had a use for them.”

Experience had taught her that such protracted trifling usually concealed an exceptional vigour of resistance, and the suspense strengthened her determination.

“My reasons are all real enough,” she answered; “but there’s one more serious than the others.”

Mr. Spragg’s brows began to jut.  “More bills?”

“No.”  She stretched out her hand and began to finger the dusty objects on his desk.  “I’m unhappy at home.”

“Unhappy—!” His start overturned the gorged waste-paper basket and shot a shower of paper across the rug.  He stooped to put the basket back; then he turned his slow fagged eyes on his daughter.  “Why, he worships the ground you walk on, Undie.”

“That’s not always a reason, for a woman—­” It was the answer she would have given to Popple or Van Degen, but she saw in an instant the mistake of thinking it would impress her father.  In the atmosphere of sentimental casuistry to which she had become accustomed, she had forgotten that Mr. Spragg’s private rule of conduct was as simple as his business morality was complicated.

He glowered at her under thrust-out brows.  “It isn’t a reason, isn’t it?  I can seem to remember the time when you used to think it was equal to a whole carload of whitewash.”

She blushed a bright red, and her own brows were levelled at his above her stormy steel-grey eyes.  The sense of her blunder made her angrier with him, and more ruthless.

“I can’t expect you to understand—­you never have, you or mother, when it came to my feelings.  I suppose some people are born sensitive—­I can’t imagine anybody’d choose to be so.  Because I’ve been too proud to complain you’ve taken it for granted that I was perfectly happy.  But my marriage was a mistake from the beginning; and Ralph feels just as I do about it.  His people hate me, they’ve always hated me; and he looks at everything as they do.  They’ve never forgiven me for his having had to go into business—­with their aristocratic ideas they look down on a man who works for his living.  Of course it’s all right for you to do it, because you’re not a Marvell or a Dagonet; but they think Ralph ought to just lie back and let you support the baby and me.”