e decided that if she went to Europe her
father and mother must go with her. The project was a bold one, and when
she broached it she had to run the whole gamut of Mr. Spragg's irony. He
wanted to know what she expected to do with him when she got him there;
whether she meant to introduce him to "all those old Kings," how she
thought he and her mother would look in court dress, and how she
supposed he was going to get on without his New York paper. But Undine
had been aware of having what he himself would have called "a pull" over
her father since, the day after their visit to the opera, he had taken
her aside to ask: "You sent back those pearls?" and she had answered
coldly: "Mrs. Heeny's taken them."

After a moment of half-bewildered resistance her parents, perhaps
secretly flattered by this first expression of her need for them, had
yielded to her entreaty, packed their trunks, and stoically set out for
the unknown. Neither Mr. Spragg nor his wife had ever before been out of
their country; and Undine had not understood, till they stood beside
her tongue-tied and helpless on the dock at Cherbourg, the task she
had undertaken in uprooting them. Mr. Spragg had never been physically
active, but on foreign shores he was seized by a strange restlessness,
and a helpless dependence on his daughter. Mrs. Spragg's long habit of
apathy was overcome by her dread of being left alone when her husband
and Undine went out, and she delayed and impeded their expeditions
by insisting on accompanying them; so that, much as Undine disliked
sightseeing, there seemed no alternative between "going round" with her
parents and shutting herself up with them in the crowded hotels to which
she successively transported them.

The hotels were the only European institutions that really interested
Mr. Spragg. He considered them manifestly inferior to those at home;
but he was haunted by a statistical curiosity as to their size, their
number, their cost and their capacity for housing and feeding the
incalculable hordes of his countrymen. He went through galleries,
churches and museums in a stolid silence like his daughter's; but in the
hotels he never ceased to enquire and investigate, questioning every one
who could speak English, comparing bills, collecting prospectuses and
computing the cost of construction and the probable return on the
investment. He regarded the non-existence of the cold-storage system as
one more proof of European inferiorit