"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