“No—­you are,” said Mrs. Heeny bluntly.  “Don’t you know it’s the thing in the best society to pretend that girls can’t do anything without their mothers’ permission?  You just remember that.  Undine.  You mustn’t accept invitations from gentlemen without you say you’ve got to ask your mother first.”

“Mercy!  But how’ll mother know what to say?”

“Why, she’ll say what you tell her to, of course.  You’d better tell her you want to dine with Mrs. Fairford,” Mrs. Heeny added humorously, as she gathered her waterproof together and stooped for her bag.

“Have I got to write the note, then?” Mrs. Spragg asked with rising agitation.

Mrs. Heeny reflected.  “Why, no.  I guess Undine can write it as if it was from you.  Mrs. Fairford don’t know your writing.”

This was an evident relief to Mrs. Spragg, and as Undine swept to her room with the note her mother sank back, murmuring plaintively:  “Oh, don’t go yet, Mrs. Heeny.  I haven’t seen a human being all day, and I can’t seem to find anything to say to that French maid.”

Mrs. Heeny looked at her hostess with friendly compassion.  She was well aware that she was the only bright spot on Mrs. Spragg’s horizon.  Since the Spraggs, some two years previously, had moved from Apex City to New York, they had made little progress in establishing relations with their new environment; and when, about four months earlier, Mrs. Spragg’s doctor had called in Mrs. Heeny to minister professionally to his patient, he had done more for her spirit than for her body.  Mrs. Heeny had had such “cases” before:  she knew the rich helpless family, stranded in lonely splendour in a sumptuous West Side hotel, with a father compelled to seek a semblance of social life at the hotel bar, and a mother deprived of even this contact with her kind, and reduced to illness by boredom and inactivity.  Poor Mrs. Spragg had done her own washing in her youth, but since her rising fortunes had made this occupation unsuitable she had sunk into the relative inertia which the ladies of Apex City regarded as one of the prerogatives of affluence.  At Apex, however, she had belonged to a social club, and, until they moved to the Mealey House, had been kept busy by the incessant struggle with domestic cares; whereas New York seemed to offer no field for any form of lady-like activity.  She therefore took her exercise vicariously, with Mrs. Heeny’s help; and Mrs. Heeny knew how to manipulate her imagination as well as her muscles.  It was Mrs. Heeny who peopled the solitude of the long ghostly days with lively anecdotes of the Van Degens, the Driscolls, the Chauncey Ellings and the other social potentates whose least doings Mrs. Spragg and Undine had followed from afar in the Apex papers, and who had come to seem so much more remote since only the width of the Central Park divided mother and daughter from their Olympian portals.

Mrs. Spragg had no ambition for herself—­she seemed to have transferred her whole personality to her child—­but she was passionately resolved that Undine should have what she wanted, and she sometimes fancied that Mrs. Heeny, who crossed those sacred thresholds so familiarly, might some day gain admission for Undine.