Chapter 1

"Undine Spragg--how can you?" her mother wailed, raising a
prematurely-wrinkled hand heavy with rings to defend the note which a
languid "bell-boy" had just brought in.

But her defence was as feeble as her protest, and she continued to
smile on her visitor while Miss Spragg, with a turn of her quick young
fingers, possessed herself of the missive and withdrew to the window to
read it.

"I guess it's meant for me," she merely threw over her shoulder at her
mother.

"Did you EVER, Mrs. Heeny?" Mrs. Spragg murmured with deprecating pride.

Mrs. Heeny, a stout professional-looking person in a waterproof, her
rusty veil thrown back, and a shabby alligator bag at her feet, followed
the mother's glance with good-humoured approval.

"I never met with a lovelier form," she agreed, answering the spirit
rather than the letter of her hostess's enquiry.

Mrs. Spragg and her visitor were enthroned in two heavy gilt armchairs
in one of the private drawing-rooms of the Hotel Stentorian. The Spragg
rooms were known as one of the Looey suites, and the drawing-room walls,
above their wainscoting of highly-varnished mahogany, were hung with
salmon-pink damask and adorned with oval portraits of Marie Antoinette
and the Princess de Lamballe. In the centre of the florid carpet a gilt
table with a top of Mexican onyx sustained a palm in a gilt basket tied
with a pink bow. But for this ornament, and a copy of "The Hound of the
Baskervilles" which lay beside it, the room showed no traces of human
use, and Mrs. Spragg herself wore as complete an air of detachment as if
she had been a wax figure in a show-window. Her attire was fashionable
enough to justify such a post, and her pale soft-cheeked face, with
puffy eye-lids and drooping mouth, suggested a partially-melted wax
figure which had run to double-chin.

Mrs. Heeny, in comparison, had a reassuring look of solidity and
reality. The planting of her firm black bulk in its chair, and the
grasp of her broad red hands on the gilt arms, bespoke an organized and
self-reliant activity, accounted for by the fact that Mrs. Heeny was a
"society" manicure and masseuse. Toward Mrs. Spragg and her daughter
she filled the double role of manipulator and friend; and it was in the
latter capacity that, her day's task ended, she had dropped in for a
moment to "cheer up" the lonely ladies of the Stentorian.

The young girl whose "form" had won Mrs. Heeny's professional
commendation suddenly shifted its lovely lines as she turned back from
the window.

"Here--you can have it after all," she said, crumpling the note and
tossing it with a contemptuous gesture into