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.”
Mrs. Spragg took up her moan. “Don’t
you tell her you saw him, Abner.”
“I’ll do as you say; but she may meet
him herself.”
“Oh, I guess not—not in this new
set she’s going with! Don’t tell her
anyhow.”
He turned away, feeling for one of the cigars which
he always carried loose in his pocket; and his wife,
rising, stole after him, and laid her hand on his
arm.
“He can’t do anything to her, can he?”
“Do anything to her?” He swung about furiously.
“I’d like to see him touch her—that’s
all!”
Undine’s white and gold bedroom, with sea-green
panels and old rose carpet, looked along Seventy-second
Street toward the leafless tree-tops of the Central
Park.
She went to the window, and drawing back its many
layers of lace gazed eastward down the long brownstone
perspective. Beyond the Park lay Fifth Avenue—and
Fifth Avenue was where she wanted to be!
She turned back into the room, and going to her writing-table
laid Mrs. Fairford’s note before her, and began
to study it minutely. She had read in the “Boudoir
Chat” of one of the Sunday papers that the smartest
women were using the new pigeon-blood notepaper with
white ink; and rather against her mother’s advice
she had ordered a large supply, with her monogram
in silver. It was a disappointment, therefore,
to find that Mrs. Fairford wrote on the old-fashioned
white sheet, without even a monogram—simply
her address and telephone number. It gave Undine
