under the
snapping eyes of Mrs. Heeny: "No, not by this post either--I begin to
think I must have lost a letter"; and it was then that Mr. Spragg,
who had sat silently looking up at the ceiling, cut short his wife's
exclamation by an enquiry about real estate in the Bronx. After that,
Ralph noticed, Mrs. Spragg never again renewed her question; and he
understood that his father-in-law had guessed his embarrassment and
wished to spare it.

Ralph had never thought of looking for any delicacy of feeling under
Mr. Spragg's large lazy irony, and the incident drew the two men nearer
together. Mrs. Spragg, for her part, was certainly not delicate; but
she was simple and without malice, and Ralph liked her for her silent
acceptance of her diminished state. Sometimes, as he sat between the
lonely primitive old couple, he wondered from what source Undine's
voracious ambitions had been drawn: all she cared for, and attached
importance to, was as remote from her parents' conception of life as her
impatient greed from their passive stoicism.

One hot afternoon toward the end of June Ralph suddenly wondered if
Clare Van Degen were still in town. She had dined in Washington Square
some ten days earlier, and he remembered her saying that she had sent
the children down to Long Island, but that she herself meant to stay on
in town till the heat grew unbearable. She hated her big showy place on
Long Island, she was tired of the spring trip to London and Paris, where
one met at every turn the faces one had grown sick of seeing all winter,
and she declared that in the early summer New York was the only place in
which one could escape from New Yorkers... She put the case amusingly,
and it was like her to take up any attitude that went against the habits
of her set; but she lived at the mercy of her moods, and one could never
tell how long any one of them would rule her.

As he sat in his office, with the noise and glare of the endless
afternoon rising up in hot waves from the street, there wandered into
Ralph's mind a vision of her shady drawing-room. All day it hung before
him like the mirage of a spring before a dusty traveller: he felt a
positive thirst for her presence, for the sound of her voice, the wide
spaces and luxurious silences surrounding her.

It was perhaps because, on that particular day, a spiral pain was
twisting around in the back of his head, and digging in a little deeper
with each twist, and because the figures on