"Who? Ralph Marvell? Why, of course he did--Mr. Popple brought him to
the party here last night."
"Well, there you are... When a young man in society wants to meet a girl
again, he gets his sister to ask her."
Undine stared at her incredulously. "How queer! But they haven't all
got sisters, have they? It must be fearfully poky for the ones that
haven't."
"They get their mothers--or their married friends," said Mrs. Heeny
omnisciently.
"Married gentlemen?" enquired Mrs. Spragg, slightly shocked, but
genuinely desirous of mastering her lesson.
"Mercy, no! Married ladies."
"But are there never any gentlemen present?" pursued Mrs. Spragg,
feeling that if this were the case Undine would certainly be
disappointed.
"Present where? At their dinners? Of course--Mrs. Fairford gives the
smartest little dinners in town. There was an account of one she gave
last week in this morning's TOWN TALK: I guess it's right here among my
clippings." Mrs. Heeny, swooping down on her bag, drew from it a handful
of newspaper cuttings, which she spread on her ample lap and proceeded
to sort with a moistened forefinger. "Here," she said, holding one of
the slips at arm's length; and throwing back her head she read, in a
slow unpunctuated chant: '"Mrs. Henley Fairford gave another of her
natty little dinners last Wednesday as usual it was smart small and
exclusive and there was much gnashing of teeth among the left-outs
as Madame Olga Loukowska gave some of her new steppe dances after
dinner'--that's the French for new dance steps," Mrs. Heeny concluded,
thrusting the documents back into her bag.
"Do you know Mrs. Fairford too?" Undine asked eagerly; while Mrs.
Spragg, impressed, but anxious for facts, pursued: "Does she reside on
Fifth Avenue?"
"No, she has a little house in Thirty-eighth Street, down beyond Park
Avenue."
The ladies' faces drooped again, and the masseuse went on promptly: "But
they're glad enough to have her in the big houses!--Why, yes, I know
her," she said, addressing herself to Undine. "I mass'd her for a
sprained ankle a couple of years ago. She's got a lovely manner, but
NO conversation. Some of my patients converse exquisitely," Mrs. Heeny
added with discrimination.
Undine was brooding over the note. "It IS written to mother--Mrs. Abner
E. Spragg--I never saw anything so funny! 'Will you ALLOW your daughter
to dine with me?' Allow! Is Mrs. Fairford peculiar?"
"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.
"Well--I'll stay a little mite longer if you want; and supposing I was
to rub up your nails while we're talking? It'll be more sociable," the
masseuse suggested, lifting her bag to the table and covering its shiny
onyx surface with bottles and polishers.
Mrs. Spragg consentingly slipped the rings from her small mottled hands.
It was soothing to feel herself in Mrs. Heeny's grasp, and though she
knew the attention would cost her three dollars she was secure in the
sense that Abner wouldn't mind. It had been clear to Mrs. Spragg, ever
since their rather precipitate departure from Apex City, that Abner was
resolved not to mind--resolved at any cost to "see through" the
New York adventure. It seemed likely now that the cost would be
considerable. They had lived in New York for two years without any
social benefit to their daughter; and it was of course for that purpose
that they had come. If, at the time, there had been other and more
pressing reasons, they were such as Mrs. Spragg and her husband
never touched on, even in the gilded privacy of their bedroom at the
Stentorian; and so completely had silence closed in on the subject that
to Mrs. Spragg it had become non-existent: she really believed that,
as Abner put it, they had left Apex because Undine was too big for the
place.
She seemed as yet--poor child!--too small for New York: actually
imperceptible to its heedless multitudes; and her mother trembled for
the day when her invisibility should be borne in on her. Mrs. Spragg
did not mind the long delay for herself--she had stores of lymphatic
patience. But she had noticed lately that Undine was beginning to be
nervous, and there was nothing that Undine's parents dreaded so much as
her being nervous. Mrs. Spragg's maternal apprehensions unconsciously
escaped in her next words.
"I do hope she'll quiet down now," she murmured, feeling quieter herself
as her hand sank into Mrs. Heeny's roomy palm.
"Who's that? Undine?"
"Yes. She seemed so set on that Mr. Popple's coming round. From the way
he acted last night she thought he'd be sure to come round this morning.
She's so lonesome, poor child--I can't say as I blame her."
"Oh, he'll come round. Things don't happen as quick as that in New
York," said Mrs. Heeny, driving her nail-polisher cheeringly.
Mrs. Spragg sighed again. "They don't appear to. They say New Yorkers
are always in a hurry; but I can't say as they've hurried much to make
our acquaintance."
Mrs. Heeny drew back to study the effect of her work. "You wait, Mrs.
Spragg, you wait. If you go too fast you sometimes have to rip out the
whole seam."
"Oh, that's so--that's SO!" Mrs. Spragg exclaimed, with a tragic
emphasis that made the masseuse glance up at her.
"Of course it's so. And it's more so in New York than anywhere. The
wrong set's like fly-paper: once you're in it you can pull and pull, but
you'll never get out of it again."
Undine's mother heaved another and more helpless sigh. "I wish YOU'D
tell Undine that, Mrs. Heeny."
"Oh, I guess Undine's all right. A girl like her can afford to wait.
And if young Marvell's really taken with her she'll have the run of the
place in no time."
This solacing thought enabled Mrs. Spragg to yield herself unreservedly
to Mrs. Heeny's ministrations, which were prolonged for a happy
confidential hour; and she had just bidden the masseuse good-bye, and
was restoring the rings to her fingers, when the door opened to admit
her husband.
Mr. Spragg came in silently, setting his high hat down on the
centre-table, and laying his overcoat across one of the gilt chairs. He
was tallish, grey-bearded and somewhat stooping, with the slack figure
of the sedentary man who would be stout if he were not dyspeptic; and
his cautious grey eyes with pouch-like underlids had straight black
brows like his daughter's. His thin hair was worn a little too long over
his coat collar, and a Masonic emblem dangled from the heavy gold chain
which crossed his crumpled black waistcoat.
He stood still in the middle of the room, casting a slow pioneering
glance about its gilded void; then he said gently: "Well, mother?"
Mrs. Spragg remained seated, but her eyes dwelt on him affectionately.
"Undine's been asked out to a dinner-party; and Mrs. Heeny says it's to
one of the first families. It's the sister of one of the gentlemen that
Mabel Lipscomb introduced her to last night."
There was a mild triumph in her tone, for it was owing to her insistence
and Undine's that Mr. Spragg had been induced to give up the house
they had bought in West End Avenue, and move with his family to the
Stentorian. Undine had early decided that they could not hope to get
on while they "kept house"--all the fashionable people she knew either
boarded or lived in hotels. Mrs. Spragg was easily induced to take the
same view, but Mr. Spragg had resisted, being at the moment unable
either to sell his house or to let it as advantageously as he had hoped.
After the move was made it seemed for a time as though he had been
right, and the first social steps would be as difficult to make in a
hotel as in one's own house; and Mrs. Spragg was therefore eager to have
him know that Undine really owed her first invitation to a meeting under
the roof of the Stentorian.
"You see we were right to come here, Abner," she added, and he absently
rejoined: "I guess you two always manage to be right."
But his face remained unsmiling, and instead of seating himself and
lighting his cigar, as he usually did before dinner, he took two or
three aimless turns about the room, and then paused in front of his
wife.
"What's the matter--anything wrong down town?" she asked, her eyes
reflecting his anxiety.
Mrs. Spragg's knowledge of what went on "down town" was of the most
elementary kind, but her husband's face was the barometer in which she
had long been accustomed to read the leave to go on unrestrictedly,
or the warning to pause and abstain till the coming storm should be
weathered.
He shook his head. "N--no. Nothing worse than what I can see to, if you
and Undine will go steady for a while." He paused and looked across the
room at his daughter's door. "Where is she--out?"
"I guess she's in her room, going over her dresses with that French
maid. I don't know as she's got anything fit to wear to that dinner,"
Mrs. Spragg added in a tentative murmur.
Mr. Spragg smiled at last. "Well--I guess she WILL have," he said
prophetically.
He glanced again at his daughter's door, as if to make sure of its being
shut; then, standing close before his wife, he lowered his voice to say:
"I saw Elmer Moffatt down town to-day."
"Oh, Abner!" A wave of almost physical apprehension passed over Mrs.
Spragg. Her jewelled hands trembled in her black brocade lap, and the
pulpy curves of her face collapsed as if it were a pricked balloon.
"Oh, Abner," she moaned again, her eyes also on her daughter's door. Mr.
Spragg's black eyebrows gathered in an angry frown, but it was evident
that his anger was not against his wife.
"What's the good of Oh Abner-ing? Elmer Moffatt's nothing to us--no
more'n if we never laid eyes on him."
"No--I know it; but what's he doing here? Did you speak to him?" she
faltered.
He slipped his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. "No--I guess Elmer and
I are pretty well talked out."