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.