Undine leaned close enough for her lowered voice to reach him.  “Can’t you understand that, knowing how they all feel about me—­and how Ralph feels—­I’d give almost anything to get away?”

Her father looked at her compassionately.  “I guess most of us feel that once in a way when we’re youngy, Undine.  Later on you’ll see going away ain’t much use when you’ve got to turn round and come back.”

She nodded at him with close-pressed lips, like a child in possession of some solemn secret.

“That’s just it—­that’s the reason I’m so wild to go; because it might mean I wouldn’t ever have to come back.”

“Not come back?  What on earth are you talking about?”

“It might mean that I could get free—­begin over again...”

He had pushed his seat back with a sudden jerk and cut her short by striking his palm on the arm of the chair.

“For the Lord’s sake.  Undine—­do you know what you’re saying?”

“Oh, yes, I know.”  She gave him back a confident smile.  “If I can get away soon—­go straight over to Paris...there’s some one there who’d do anything... who could do anything...if I was free...”

Mr. Spragg’s hands continued to grasp his chair-arms.  “Good God, Undine Marvell—­are you sitting there in your sane senses and talking to me of what you could do if you were free?”

Their glances met in an interval of speechless communion; but Undine did not shrink from her father’s eyes and when she lowered her own it seemed to be only because there was nothing left for them to say.

“I know just what I could do if I were free.  I could marry the right man,” she answered boldly.

He met her with a murmur of helpless irony.  “The right man?  The right man?  Haven’t you had enough of trying for him yet?”

As he spoke the door behind them opened, and Mr. Spragg looked up abruptly.

The stenographer stood on the threshold, and above her shoulder Undine perceived the ingratiating grin of Elmer Moffatt.

“’A little farther lend thy guiding hand’—­but I guess I can go the rest of the way alone,” he said, insinuating himself through the doorway with an airy gesture of dismissal; then he turned to Mr. Spragg and Undine.

“I agree entirely with Mrs. Marvell—­and I’m happy to have the opportunity of telling her so,” he proclaimed, holding his hand out gallantly.

Undine stood up with a laugh.  “It sounded like old times, I suppose—­you thought father and I were quarrelling?  But we never quarrel any more:  he always agrees with me.”  She smiled at Mr. Spragg and turned her shining eyes on Moffatt.  “I wish that treaty had been signed a few years sooner!” the latter rejoined in his usual tone of humorous familiarity.

Undine had not met him since her marriage, and of late the adverse turn of his fortunes had carried him quite beyond her thoughts.  But his actual presence was always stimulating, and even through her self-absorption she was struck by his air of almost defiant prosperity.  He did not look like a man who has been beaten; or rather he looked like a man who does not know when he is beaten; and his eye had the gleam of mocking confidence that had carried him unabashed through his lowest hours at Apex.