The Custom of the Country | Page 3

say you've got to ask

your mother first."
"Mercy! But how'll mother know what to say?"
"Why, she'll say what you tell her to, of course. You'd better tell her
you want to dine with Mrs. Fairford," Mrs. Heeny added humorously,
as she gathered her waterproof together and stooped for her bag.
"Have I got to write the note, then?" Mrs. Spragg asked with rising
agitation.
Mrs. Heeny reflected. "Why, no. I guess Undine can write it as if it was
from you. Mrs. Fairford don't know your writing."
This was an evident relief to Mrs. Spragg, and as Undine swept to her
room with the note her mother sank back, murmuring plaintively: "Oh,
don't go yet, Mrs. Heeny. I haven't seen a human being all day, and I
can't seem to find anything to say to that French maid."
Mrs. Heeny looked at her hostess with friendly compassion. She was
well aware that she was the only bright spot on Mrs. Spragg's horizon.
Since the Spraggs, some two years previously, had moved from Apex
City to New York, they had made little progress in establishing
relations with their new environment; and when, about four months
earlier, Mrs. Spragg's doctor had called in Mrs. Heeny to minister
professionally to his patient, he had done more for her spirit than for
her body. Mrs. Heeny had had such "cases" before: she knew the rich
helpless family, stranded 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.
Mrs. Spragg consentingly slipped the rings from her small mottled
hands. It was soothing to feel herself in Mrs. Heeny's grasp, and though
she knew the attention would cost her three dollars she was secure in
the sense that Abner wouldn't mind. It had been clear to Mrs. Spragg,
ever since their rather precipitate departure from Apex City, that Abner
was resolved not to mind--resolved at any cost to "see through" the
New York adventure. It seemed likely now that the cost would be
considerable. They had lived in New York for two years without any
social benefit to their daughter; and it was of course for that purpose
that they had come. If, at the time, there had been other and more
pressing reasons, they were such as Mrs. Spragg and her husband never
touched on, even in the gilded privacy of their bedroom at the
Stentorian; and so completely had silence closed in on the subject that
to Mrs. Spragg it had become non-existent: she really believed that, as
Abner put it, they had left Apex because Undine was too big for the
place.
She seemed as yet--poor child!--too small for New York: actually
imperceptible to its heedless multitudes; and her mother trembled for
the day when her invisibility should be borne in on her. Mrs. Spragg
did not mind the long delay for herself--she had stores of lymphatic
patience. But she had noticed lately that Undine was beginning to be
nervous, and there was nothing that Undine's