Undine, when she took his meaning, had been terrible.  Everything had gone down before her, as towns and villages went down before one of the tornadoes of her native state.  Wait awhile?  Look round?  Did he suppose she was marrying for money?  Didn’t he see it was all a question, now and here, of the kind of people she wanted to “go with”?  Did he want to throw her straight back into the Lipscomb set, to have her marry a dentist and live in a West Side flat?  Why hadn’t they stayed in Apex, if that was all he thought she was fit for?  She might as well have married Millard Binch, instead of handing him over to Indiana Frusk!  Couldn’t her father understand that nice girls, in New York, didn’t regard getting married like going on a buggy-ride?  It was enough to ruin a girl’s chances if she broke her engagement to a man in Ralph Marvell’s set.  All kinds of spiteful things would be said about her, and she would never be able to go with the right people again.  They had better go back to Apex right off—­it was they and not she who had wanted to leave Apex, anyhow—­she could call her mother to witness it.  She had always, when it came to that, done what her father and mother wanted, but she’d given up trying to make out what they were after, unless it was to make her miserable; and if that was it, hadn’t they had enough of it by this time?  She had, anyhow.  But after this she meant to lead her own life; and they needn’t ask her where she was going, or what she meant to do, because this time she’d die before she told them—­and they’d made life so hateful to her that she only wished she was dead already.

Mr. Spragg heard her out in silence, pulling at his beard with one sallow wrinkled hand, while the other dragged down the armhole of his waistcoat.  Suddenly he looked up and said:  “Ain’t you in love with the fellow, Undie?”

The girl glared back at him, her splendid brows beetling like an Amazon’s.  “Do you think I’d care a cent for all the rest of it if I wasn’t?”

“Well, if you are, you and he won’t mind beginning in a small way.”

Her look poured contempt on his ignorance.  “Do you s’pose I’d drag him down?” With a magnificent gesture she tore Marvell’s ring from her finger.  “I’ll send this back this minute.  I’ll tell him I thought he was a rich man, and now I see I’m mistaken—­” She burst into shattering sobs, rocking her beautiful body back and forward in all the abandonment of young grief; and her father stood over her, stroking her shoulder and saying helplessly:  “I’ll see what I can do, Undine—­”

All his life, and at ever-diminishing intervals, Mr. Spragg had been called on by his womenkind to “see what he could do”; and the seeing had almost always resulted as they wished.  Undine did not have to send back her ring, and in her state of trance-like happiness she hardly asked by what means her path had been smoothed, but merely accepted her mother’s assurance that “father had fixed everything all right.”