“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.”
