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Spragg had long since measured the extent of profitable resistance, and knew just when it became vain to hold out against his daughter or advise others to do so. Ralph, for his own part, had no inclination to resist. As he left Moffatt's office his inmost feeling was one of relief. He had reached the point of recognizing that it was best for both that his wife should go.
They had counted a great deal on the Fairford dinner as a means of tranquillization, and it was a blow to detect signs of the opposite result when, late the next morning, their daughter came dawdling into the sodden splendour of the Stentorian breakfast-room. The symptoms of Undine's nervousness were unmistakable to Mr. and Mrs. Spragg.
He will by no means seem to crouch to my Lord, but says that he hath as good blood in his veins as any man, though not so good a title, but that he will do nothing to wrong or prejudice my Lord, and I hope he will not, nor I believe can; but he tells me that Sir E. Spragg and Utber are the men that have done my Lord the most wrong, and did bespatter him the most at Oxford, and that my Lord was misled to believe that all that was there said was his, which indeed it was not, and says that he did at that time complain to his father of this his misfortune.
He looked fagged and sallow, like the day. Ralph sat down on the other side of the desk. For a moment his throat contracted as it had when he had tried to question his sister; then he asked: "Where's Undine?" Mr. Spragg glanced at the calendar that hung from a hat-peg on the door. Then he released the Masonic emblem from his grasp, drew out his watch and consulted it critically.
It was so unlike her to miss any opportunity of the kind that Ralph had felt a little anxious. But with the arrival of the packers she was afoot and in command again, and he withdrew submissively, as Mr. Spragg, in the early Apex days, might have fled from the spring storm of "house-cleaning." When he entered the sitting-room, he found it still in disorder.
Spragg pondered the reply; then he opened the door and suffered Moffatt to follow him in. Behind an inner glazed enclosure, with its one window dimmed by a sooty perspective barred with chimneys, he seated himself at a dusty littered desk, and groped instinctively for the support of the scrap basket. Moffatt, uninvited, dropped into the nearest chair, and Mr.
Spragg was standing near her mother, who sat in a drooping attitude, her head sunk on her breast, as she did when she had one of her "turns." He looked up abruptly as Undine entered. "Father has mother told you? Mrs. Fairford has asked me to dine. She's Mrs. Paul Marvell's daughter Mrs. Marvell was a Dagonet and they're sweller than anybody; they WON'T KNOW the Driscolls and Van Degens!" Mr.
"It's because I knew he would manage to make cooking-stoves as unremunerative as a profession that I saved him from so glaring a failure by putting him into the law." The retort drew a grunt of amusement from Mr. Spragg; and the eyes of the two men met in unexpected understanding. "That so? What can he do, then?" the future father-in-law enquired.
Since she could not accuse herself of extravagance having still full faith in her gift of "managing" she could only conclude that it was impossible to live on what her father and Ralph could provide; and this seemed a practical reason for desiring her freedom. If she and Ralph parted he would of course return to his family, and Mr. Spragg would no longer be burdened with a helpless son-in-law.
He meant that she should have the "handsomest" wedding the New York press had ever celebrated, and her mother's fancy was already afloat on a sea of luxuries a motor, a Fifth Avenue house, and a tiara that should out-blaze Mrs. Van Degen's; but these were movable benefits, to be conferred whenever Mr. Spragg happened to be "on the right side" of the market.
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