Undine shrugged her shoulders. "It was a mistake, of course. Why on
earth did you let him come up?"

"I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie."

This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. "Well, did he?" she
asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx
table.

"Why, no--he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn't make
out what he was after," Mrs. Spragg was obliged to own.

Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. "You
never CAN," she murmured, turning away.

She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and
lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs. Spragg timidly
slipped a cushion under her daughter's head, and then dissembled herself
behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out
down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It
was one of Mrs. Spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting
of New York.

Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in
one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a
long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to
an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the
future would be. And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she
sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best.