“Why, they told me so.  I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he’d asked for me.”  Mrs. Spragg let the fact speak for itself—­it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation.

Undine shrugged her shoulders.  “It was a mistake, of course.  Why on earth did you let him come up?”

“I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie.”

This plea struck her daughter as not without weight.  “Well, did he?” she asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx table.

“Why, no—­he just conversed.  He was lovely to me, but I couldn’t make out what he was after,” Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own.

Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration.  “You never can,” she murmured, turning away.

She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee.  Mrs. Spragg timidly slipped a cushion under her daughter’s head, and then dissembled herself behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park.  It was one of Mrs. Spragg’s chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting of New York.

Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head.  She was plunged in one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the future would be.  And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement:  she honestly wanted the best.

Her first struggle—­after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk for a new toy—­had been to get away from Apex in summer.  Her summers, as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and most exasperating in her life.  The earliest had been spent in the yellow “frame” cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk.  Later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes.  The tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks, and making it possible for Undine, when she met Indiana in the street or at school, to chill her advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life.  But even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it implied, the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house.  At school Undine met other girls whose parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to California, others—­oh bliss ineffable!—­went “east.”