After a few weeks it became evident to both parents
and daughter that their unnatural association could
not continue much longer. Mrs. Spragg’s
shrinking from everything new and unfamiliar had developed
into a kind of settled terror, and Mr. Spragg had
begun to be depressed by the incredible number of
the hotels and their simply incalculable housing capacity.
“It ain’t that they’re any great
shakes in themselves, any one of ’em; but there’s
such a darned lot of ’em: they’re
as thick as mosquitoes, every place you go.”
And he began to reckon up, on slips of paper, on the
backs of bills and the margins of old newspapers, the
number of travellers who could be simultaneously lodged,
bathed and boarded on the continent of Europe.
“Five hundred bedrooms—three hundred
bathrooms—no; three hundred and fifty bathrooms,
that one has: that makes, supposing two-thirds
of ’em double up—do you s’pose
as many as that do, Undie? That porter at Lucerne
told me the Germans slept three in a room—well,
call it eight hundred people; and three meals a day
per head; no, four meals, with that afternoon tea
they take; and the last place we were at—’way
up on that mountain there—why, there were
seventy-five hotels in that one spot alone, and all
jam full—well, it beats me to know where
all the people come from...”
He had gone on in this fashion for what seemed to
his daughter an endless length of days; and then suddenly
he had roused himself to say: “See here,
Undie, I got to go back and make the money to pay for
all this.”
There had been no question on the part of any of the
three of Undine’s returning with them; and after
she had conveyed them to their steamer, and seen their
vaguely relieved faces merged in the handkerchief-waving
throng along the taffrail, she had returned alone to
Paris and made her unsuccessful attempt to enlist
the aid of Indiana Rolliver.
XXVII
She was still brooding over this last failure when
one afternoon, as she loitered on the hotel terrace,
she was approached by a young woman whom she had seen
sitting near the wheeled chair of an old lady wearing
a crumpled black bonnet under a funny fringed parasol
with a jointed handle.
The young woman, who was small, slight and brown,
was dressed with a disregard of the fashion which
contrasted oddly with the mauve powder on her face
and the traces of artificial colour in her dark untidy
hair. She looked as if she might have several
different personalities, and as if the one of the
moment had been hanging up a long time in her wardrobe
and been hurriedly taken down as probably good enough
for the present occasion.
With her hands in her jacket pockets, and an agreeable
smile on her boyish face, she strolled up to Undine
and asked, in a pretty variety of Parisian English,
if she had the pleasure of speaking to Mrs. Marvell.
On Undine’s assenting, the smile grew more alert
and the lady continued: “I think you know
my friend Sacha Adelschein?”
