‘How queer! But they haven’t all got sisters, have they? It must be fearfully poky for the ones that haven’t.’

‘They get their mothers – or their married friends,’ said Mrs Heeny omnisciently.

‘Married gentlemen?’ inquired Mrs Spragg, slightly shocked, but genuinely desirous of mastering her lesson.

‘Mercy, no! Married ladies.’

‘But are there never any gentlemen present?’ pursued Mrs Spragg, feeling that if this were the case Undine would certainly be disappointed.

‘Present where? At their dinners? Of course – Mrs Fairford gives the smartest little dinners in town. There was an account of one she gave last week in this morning’s Town Talk: I guess it’s right here among my clippings.’ Mrs Heeny, swooping down on her bag, drew from it a handful of newspaper cuttings, which she spread on her ample lap and proceeded to sort with a moistened forefinger. ‘Here,’ she said, holding one of the slips at arm’s length; and throwing back her head she read, in a slow unpunctuated chant: ‘ “Mrs Henley Fairford gave another of her natty little dinners last Wednesday as usual it was smart small and exclusive and there was much gnashing of teeth among the left-outs as Madame Olga Loukowska gave some of her new steppe dances after dinner” – that’s the French for new dance steps,’ Mrs Heeny concluded, thrusting the documents back into her bag.

‘Do you know Mrs Fairford too?’ Undine asked eagerly; while Mrs Spragg, impressed, but anxious for facts, pursued: ‘Does she reside on Fifth Avenue?’

‘No, she has a little house in Thirty-eighth Street, down beyond Park Avenue.’

The ladies’ faces drooped again, and the masseuse went on promptly: ‘But they’re glad enough to have her in the big houses! – Why, yes, I know her,’ she said, addressing herself to Undine. ‘I mass’d her for a sprained ankle a couple of years ago. She’s got a lovely manner, but no conversation. Some of my patients converse exquisitely,’ Mrs Heeny added with discrimination.

Undine was brooding over the note. ‘It is written to mother – Mrs Abner E. Spragg – I never saw anything so funny! “Will you allow your daughter to dine with me?” Allow! Is Mrs Fairford peculiar?’

‘No – you are,’ said Mrs Heeny bluntly. ‘Don’t you know it’s the thing in the best society to pretend that girls can’t do anything without their mothers’ permission? You just remember that, Undine. You mustn’t accept invitations from gentlemen without you say you’ve got to ask your mother first.’

‘Mercy! But how’ll mother know what to say?’

‘Why, she’ll say what you tell her to, of course. You’d better tell her you want to dine with Mrs Fairford,’ Mrs Heeny added humorously, as she gathered her waterproof together and stooped for her bag.

‘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 Undine should have what she wanted, and she sometimes fancied that Mrs Heeny, who crossed those sacred thresholds so familiarly, might some day gain admission for Undine.

‘Well – I’ll stay a little mite longer if you want; and supposing I was to rub up your nails while we’re talking? It’ll be more sociable,’ the masseuse suggested, lifting her bag to the table and covering its shiny onyx surface with bottles and polishers.

Mrs Spragg consentingly slipped the rings from her small mottled hands. It was soothing to feel herself in Mrs Heeny’s grasp, and though she knew the attention would cost her three dollars she was secure in the sense that Abner wouldn’t mind. It had been clear to Mrs Spragg, ever since their rather precipitate departure from Apex City, that Abner was resolved not to mind – resolved at any cost to ‘see through’ the New York adventure. It seemed likely now that the cost would be considerable. They had lived in New York for two years without any social benefit to their daughter; and it was of course for that purpose that they had come. If, at the time, there had been other and more pressing reasons, they were such as Mrs Spragg and her husband never touched on, even in the gilded privacy of their bedroom at the Stentorian; and so completely had silence closed in on the subject that to Mrs Spragg it had become non-existent: she really believed that, as Abner put it, they had left Apex because Undine was too big for the place.

She seemed as yet – poor child! – too small for New York: actually imperceptible to its heedless multitudes; and her mother trembled for the day when her invisibility should be borne in on her. Mrs Spragg did not mind the long delay for herself – she had stores of lymphatic patience. But she had noticed lately that Undine was beginning to be nervous, and there was nothing that Undine’s parents dreaded so much as her being nervous. Mrs Spragg’s maternal apprehensions unconsciously escaped in her next words.

‘I do hope she’ll quiet down now,’ she murmured, feeling quieter herself as her hand sank into Mrs Heeny’s roomy palm.

‘Who’s that? Undine?’

‘Yes.