She had given up hoping that her father might make another hit in Wall Street.  Mrs. Spragg’s letters gave the impression that the days of big strokes were over for her husband, that he had gone down in the conflict with forces beyond his measure.  If he had remained in Apex the tide of its new prosperity might have carried him to wealth; but New York’s huge waves of success had submerged instead of floating him, and Rolliver’s enmity was a hand perpetually stretched out to strike him lower.  At most, Mr. Spragg’s tenacity would keep him at the level he now held, and though he and his wife had still further simplified their way of living Undine understood that their self-denial would not increase her opportunities.  She felt no compunction in continuing to accept an undiminished allowance:  it was the hereditary habit of the parent animal to despoil himself for his progeny.  But this conviction did not seem incompatible with a sentimental pity for her parents.  Aside from all interested motives, she wished for their own sakes that they were better off.  Their personal requirements were pathetically limited, but renewed prosperity would at least have procured them the happiness of giving her what she wanted.

Moffatt lingered on; but he began to speak more definitely of sailing, and Undine foresaw the day when, strong as her attraction was, stronger influences would snap it like a thread.  She knew she interested and amused him, and that it flattered his vanity to be seen with her, and to hear that rumour coupled their names; but he gave her, more than any one she had ever known, the sense of being detached from his life, in control of it, and able, without weakness or uncertainty, to choose which of its calls he should obey.  If the call were that of business—­of any of the great perilous affairs he handled like a snake-charmer spinning the deadly reptiles about his head—­she knew she would drop from his life like a loosened leaf.

These anxieties sharpened the intensity of her enjoyment, and made the contrast keener between her crowded sparkling hours and the vacant months at Saint Desert.  Little as she understood of the qualities that made Moffatt what he was, the results were of the kind most palpable to her.  He used life exactly as she would have used it in his place.  Some of his enjoyments were beyond her range, but even these appealed to her because of the money that was required to gratify them.  When she took him to see some inaccessible picture, or went with him to inspect the treasures of a famous dealer, she saw that the things he looked at moved him in a way she could not understand, and that the actual touching of rare textures—­bronze or marble, or velvets flushed with the bloom of age—­gave him sensations like those her own beauty had once roused in him.  But the next moment he was laughing over some commonplace joke, or absorbed in a long cipher cable handed to him as they re-entered the Nouveau Luxe for tea, and his aesthetic emotions had been thrust back into their own compartment of the great steel strong-box of his mind.