I
"Undine Spragg--how can you?" her mother wailed, raising a
prematurely-wrinkled hand heavy with rings to defend the note which a
languid "bell-boy" had just brought in.
But her defence was as feeble as her protest, and she continued to
smile on her visitor while Miss Spragg, with a turn of her quick young
fingers, possessed herself of the missive and withdrew to the window to
read it.
"I guess it's meant for me," she merely threw over her shoulder at her
mother.
"Did you EVER, Mrs. Heeny?" Mrs. Spragg murmured with deprecating pride.
Mrs. Heeny, a stout professional-looking person in a waterproof, her
rusty veil thrown back, and a shabby alligator bag at her feet, followed
the mother's glance with good-humoured approval.
"I never met with a lovelier form," she agreed, answering the spirit
rather than the letter of her hostess's enquiry.
Mrs. Spragg and her visitor were enthroned in two heavy gilt armchairs
in one of the private drawing-rooms of the Hotel Stentorian. The Spragg
rooms were known as one of the Looey suites, and the drawing-room walls,
above their wainscoting of highly-varnished mahogany, were hung with
salmon-pink damask and adorned with oval portraits of Marie Antoinette
and the Princess de Lamballe. In the centre of the florid carpet a gilt
table with a top of Mexican onyx sustained a palm in a gilt basket tied
with a pink bow. But for this ornament, and a copy of "The Hound of the
Baskervilles" which lay beside it, the room showed no traces of human
use, and Mrs. Spragg herself wore as complete an air of detachment as if
she had been a wax figure in a show-window. Her attire was fashionable
enough to justify such a post, and her pale soft-cheeked face, with
puffy eye-lids and drooping mouth, suggested a partially-melted wax
figure which had run to double-chin.
Mrs. Heeny, in comparison, had a reassuring look of solidity and
reality. The planting of her firm black bulk in its chair, and the
grasp of her broad red hands on the gilt arms, bespoke an organized and
self-reliant activity, accounted for by the fact that Mrs. Heeny was a
"society" manicure and masseuse. Toward Mrs. Spragg and her daughter
she filled the double role of manipulator and friend; and it was in the
latter capacity that, her day's task ended, she had dropped in for a
moment to "cheer up" the lonely ladies of the Stentorian.
The young girl whose "form" had won Mrs. Heeny's professional
commendation suddenly shifted its lovely lines as she turned back from
the window.
"Here--you can have it after all," she said, crumpling the note and
tossing it with a contemptuous gesture into her mother's lap.
"Why--isn't it from Mr. Popple?" Mrs. Spragg exclaimed unguardedly.
"No--it isn't. What made you think I thought it was?" snapped her
daughter; but the next instant she added, with an outbreak of childish
disappointment: "It's only from Mr. Marvell's sister--at least she says
she's his sister."
Mrs. Spragg, with a puzzled frown, groped for her eye-glass among the
jet fringes of her tightly-girded front.
Mrs. Heeny's small blue eyes shot out sparks of curiosity.
"Marvell--what Marvell is that?"
The girl explained languidly: "A little fellow--I think Mr. Popple said
his name was Ralph"; while her mother continued: "Undine met them both
last night at that party downstairs. And from something Mr. Popple said
to her about going to one of the new plays, she thought--"
"How on earth do you know what I thought?" Undine flashed back, her grey
eyes darting warnings at her mother under their straight black brows.
"Why, you SAID you thought--" Mrs. Spragg began reproachfully; but Mrs.
Heeny, heedless of their bickerings, was pursuing her own train of
thought.
"What Popple? Claud Walsingham Popple--the portrait painter?"
"Yes--I suppose so. He said he'd like to paint me. Mabel Lipscomb
introduced him. I don't care if I never see him again," the girl said,
bathed in angry pink.
"Do you know him, Mrs. Heeny?" Mrs. Spragg enquired.
"I should say I did. I manicured him for his first society portrait--a
full-length of Mrs. Harmon B. Driscoll." Mrs. Heeny smiled indulgently
on her hearers. "I know everybody. If they don't know ME they ain't in
it, and Claud Walsingham Popple's in it. But he ain't nearly AS in it,"
she continued judicially, "as Ralph Marvell--the little fellow, as you
call him."
Undine Spragg, at the word, swept round on the speaker with one of the
quick turns that revealed her youthful flexibility. She was always
doubling and twisting on herself, and every movement she made seemed
to start at the nape of her neck, just below the lifted roll of
reddish-gold hair, and flow without a break through her whole slim
length to the tips of her fingers and the points of her slender restless
feet.
"Why, do you know the Marvells? Are THEY stylish?" she asked.
Mrs. Heeny gave the discouraged gesture of a pedagogue who has vainly
striven to implant the rudiments of knowledge in a rebellious mind.
"Why, Undine Spragg, I've told you all about them time and again!
His mother was a Dagonet. They live with old Urban Dagonet down in
Washington Square."
To Mrs. Spragg this conveyed even less than to her daughter, "'way down
there? Why do they live with somebody else? Haven't they got the means
to have a home of their own?"
Undine's perceptions were more rapid, and she fixed her eyes searchingly
on Mrs. Heeny.
"Do you mean to say Mr. Marvell's as swell as Mr. Popple?"
"As swell? Why, Claud Walsingham Popple ain't in the same class with
him!"
The girl was upon her mother with a spring, snatching and smoothing out
the crumpled note.
"Laura Fairford--is that the sister's name?"
"Mrs. Henley Fairford; yes. What does she write about?"
Undine's face lit up as if a shaft of sunset had struck it through the
triple-curtained windows of the Stentorian.
"She says she wants me to dine with her next Wednesday. Isn't it queer?
Why does SHE want me? She's never seen me!" Her tone implied that she
had long been accustomed to being "wanted" by those who had.