Her one thought was to return to Europe; but she did not want to go alone.  The vision of her solitary figure adrift in the spring mob of trans-Atlantic pleasure-seekers depressed and mortified her.  She would be sure to run across acquaintances, and they would infer that she was in quest of a new opportunity, a fresh start, and would suspect her of trying to use them for the purpose.  The thought was repugnant to her newly awakened pride, and she decided that if she went to Europe her father and mother must go with her.  The project was a bold one, and when she broached it she had to run the whole gamut of Mr. Spragg’s irony.  He wanted to know what she expected to do with him when she got him there; whether she meant to introduce him to “all those old Kings,” how she thought he and her mother would look in court dress, and how she supposed he was going to get on without his New York paper.  But Undine had been aware of having what he himself would have called “a pull” over her father since, the day after their visit to the opera, he had taken her aside to ask:  “You sent back those pearls?” and she had answered coldly:  “Mrs. Heeny’s taken them.”

After a moment of half-bewildered resistance her parents, perhaps secretly flattered by this first expression of her need for them, had yielded to her entreaty, packed their trunks, and stoically set out for the unknown.  Neither Mr. Spragg nor his wife had ever before been out of their country; and Undine had not understood, till they stood beside her tongue-tied and helpless on the dock at Cherbourg, the task she had undertaken in uprooting them.  Mr. Spragg had never been physically active, but on foreign shores he was seized by a strange restlessness, and a helpless dependence on his daughter.  Mrs. Spragg’s long habit of apathy was overcome by her dread of being left alone when her husband and Undine went out, and she delayed and impeded their expeditions by insisting on accompanying them; so that, much as Undine disliked sightseeing, there seemed no alternative between “going round” with her parents and shutting herself up with them in the crowded hotels to which she successively transported them.

The hotels were the only European institutions that really interested Mr. Spragg.  He considered them manifestly inferior to those at home; but he was haunted by a statistical curiosity as to their size, their number, their cost and their capacity for housing and feeding the incalculable hordes of his countrymen.  He went through galleries, churches and museums in a stolid silence like his daughter’s; but in the hotels he never ceased to enquire and investigate, questioning every one who could speak English, comparing bills, collecting prospectuses and computing the cost of construction and the probable return on the investment.  He regarded the non-existence of the cold-storage system as one more proof of European inferiority, and no longer wondered, in the absence of the room-to-room telephone, that foreigners hadn’t yet mastered the first principles of time-saving.