After a few weeks it became evident to both parents and daughter that their unnatural association could not continue much longer.  Mrs. Spragg’s shrinking from everything new and unfamiliar had developed into a kind of settled terror, and Mr. Spragg had begun to be depressed by the incredible number of the hotels and their simply incalculable housing capacity.

“It ain’t that they’re any great shakes in themselves, any one of ’em; but there’s such a darned lot of ’em:  they’re as thick as mosquitoes, every place you go.”  And he began to reckon up, on slips of paper, on the backs of bills and the margins of old newspapers, the number of travellers who could be simultaneously lodged, bathed and boarded on the continent of Europe.  “Five hundred bedrooms—­three hundred bathrooms—­no; three hundred and fifty bathrooms, that one has:  that makes, supposing two-thirds of ’em double up—­do you s’pose as many as that do, Undie?  That porter at Lucerne told me the Germans slept three in a room—­well, call it eight hundred people; and three meals a day per head; no, four meals, with that afternoon tea they take; and the last place we were at—­’way up on that mountain there—­why, there were seventy-five hotels in that one spot alone, and all jam full—­well, it beats me to know where all the people come from...”

He had gone on in this fashion for what seemed to his daughter an endless length of days; and then suddenly he had roused himself to say:  “See here, Undie, I got to go back and make the money to pay for all this.”

There had been no question on the part of any of the three of Undine’s returning with them; and after she had conveyed them to their steamer, and seen their vaguely relieved faces merged in the handkerchief-waving throng along the taffrail, she had returned alone to Paris and made her unsuccessful attempt to enlist the aid of Indiana Rolliver.

XXVII

She was still brooding over this last failure when one afternoon, as she loitered on the hotel terrace, she was approached by a young woman whom she had seen sitting near the wheeled chair of an old lady wearing a crumpled black bonnet under a funny fringed parasol with a jointed handle.

The young woman, who was small, slight and brown, was dressed with a disregard of the fashion which contrasted oddly with the mauve powder on her face and the traces of artificial colour in her dark untidy hair.  She looked as if she might have several different personalities, and as if the one of the moment had been hanging up a long time in her wardrobe and been hurriedly taken down as probably good enough for the present occasion.

With her hands in her jacket pockets, and an agreeable smile on her boyish face, she strolled up to Undine and asked, in a pretty variety of Parisian English, if she had the pleasure of speaking to Mrs. Marvell.

On Undine’s assenting, the smile grew more alert and the lady continued:  “I think you know my friend Sacha Adelschein?”