The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Custom of the Country, by Edith Wharton

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Title: The Custom of the Country

Author: Edith Wharton

Release Date: February 12, 2004 [EBook #11052]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY

by EDITH WHARTON

1913

THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY

I

"Undine Spragg--how can you?" her mother wailed, raising a
prematurely-wrinkled hand heavy with rings to defend the note which a
languid "bell-boy" had just brought in.

But her defence was as feeble as her protest, and she continued to
smile on her visitor while Miss Spragg, with a turn of her quick young
fingers, possessed herself of the missive and withdrew to the window to
read it.

"I guess it's meant for me," she merely threw over her shoulder at her
mother.

"Did you EVER, Mrs. Heeny?" Mrs. Spragg murmured with deprecating pride.

Mrs. Heeny, a stout professional-looking person in a waterproof, her
rusty veil thrown back, and a shabby alligator bag at her feet, followed
the mother's glance with good-humoured approval.

"I never met with a lovelier form," she agreed, answering the spirit
rather than the letter of her hostess's enquiry.

Mrs. Spragg and her visitor were enthroned in two heavy gilt armchairs
in one of the private drawing-rooms of the Hotel Stentorian. The Spragg
rooms were known as one of the Looey suites, and the drawing-room walls,
above their wainscoting of highly-varnished mahogany, were hung with
salmon-pink damask and adorned with oval portraits of Marie Antoinette
and the Princess de Lamballe. In the centre of the florid carpet a gilt
table with a top of Mexican onyx sustained a palm in a gilt basket tied
with a pink bow. But for this ornament, and a copy of "The Hound of the
Baskervilles" which lay beside it, the room showed no traces of human
use, and Mrs. Spragg herself wore as complete an air of detachment as if
she had been a wax figure in a show-window. Her attire was fashionable
enough to justify such a post, and her pale soft-cheeked face, with
puff