y, and no longer wondered, in
the absence of the room-to-room telephone, that foreigners hadn't yet
mastered the first principles of time-saving.

After a few weeks it became evident to both parents and daughter that
their unnatural association could not continue much longer. Mrs.
Spragg's shrinking from everything new and unfamiliar had developed into
a kind of settled terror, and Mr. Spragg had begun to be depressed
by the incredible number of the hotels and their simply incalculable
housing capacity.

"It ain't that they're any great shakes in themselves, any one of 'em;
but there's such a darned lot of 'em: they're as thick as mosquitoes,
every place you go." And he began to reckon up, on slips of paper, on
the backs of bills and the margins of old newspapers, the number of
travellers who could be simultaneously lodged, bathed and boarded on
the continent of Europe. "Five hundred bedrooms--three hundred
bathrooms--no; three hundred and fifty bathrooms, that one has: that
makes, supposing two-thirds of 'em double up--do you s'pose as many as
that do, Undie? That porter at Lucerne told me the Germans slept three
in a room--well, call it eight hundred people; and three meals a day per
head; no, four meals, with that afternoon tea they take; and the last
place we were at--'way up on that mountain there--why, there were
seventy-five hotels in that one spot alone, and all jam full--well, it
beats me to know where all the people come from..."

He had gone on in this fashion for what seemed to his daughter an
endless length of days; and then suddenly he had roused himself to say:
"See here, Undie, I got to go back and make the money to pay for all
this."

There had been no question on the part of any of the three of Undine's
returning with them; and after she had conveyed them to their steamer,
and seen their vaguely relieved faces merged in the handkerchief-waving
throng along the taffrail, she had returned alone to Paris and made her
unsuccessful attempt to enlist the aid of Indiana Rolliver.

XXVII

She was still brooding over this last failure when one afternoon, as she
loitered on the hotel terrace, she was approached by a young woman whom
she had seen sitting near the wheeled chair of an old lady wearing a
crumpled black bonnet under a funny fringed parasol with a jointed
handle.

The young woman, who was small, slight and brown, was dressed with a
disregard of the fashion which contrasted oddly with the