Mrs. Spragg's chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting
of New York.

Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in
one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a
long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to
an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the
future would be. And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she
sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best.

Her first struggle--after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk
for a new toy--had been to get away from Apex in summer. Her summers,
as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and
most exasperating in her life. The earliest had been spent in the yellow
"frame" cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes
against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and
half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from
her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at
the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb,
had moved in the first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated
floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House
had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of
lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks, and making it possible for
Undine, when she met Indiana in the street or at school, to chill her
advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life. But
even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it
implied, the long months of the middle western summer, fly-blown,
torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had
been in the little yellow house. At school Undine met other girls whose
parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to
California, others--oh bliss ineffable!--went "east."

Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealey House
routine, Undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate-pencils and drank
pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill-health; and when she
learned that even Indiana Frusk was to go on a month's visit to Buffalo
it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. Her
parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the
necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred
themselves for a month to a staring hotel