United States or Cyprus ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
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."
The results of this friendly conference had been more serious than Mr. Spragg could have foreseen and the victory remained with his antagonist. It had not entered into Mr. Spragg's calculations that he would have to give his daughter any fixed income on her marriage.
"Why on earth did we ever leave Apex, then?" she exclaimed. Mrs. Spragg's eyes usually dropped before her daughter's inclement gaze; but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck courage, till Undine's lids sank above her flushing cheeks. She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while Mrs.
"West End Avenue, of course if I can find a cab to take me there." It was not the least of Undine's grievances that she was still living in the house which represented Mr. Spragg's first real-estate venture in New York.
Spragg murmured: "She never HAS, Abner," but Mr. Spragg's brow remained unrelenting. "Do you know what a box costs?" "No; but I s'pose you do," Undine returned with unconscious flippancy. "I do. That's the trouble. WHY won't seats do you?" "Mabel could buy seats for herself." "That's so," interpolated Mrs. Spragg always the first to succumb to her daughter's arguments.
Nobody expects to make money in a PROFESSION; and if you've taught him to regard the law that way, he'd better go right into cooking-stoves and done with it." Mr. Dagonet, within a narrower range, had his own play of humour; and it met Mr. Spragg's with a leap.
"Oh, Abner," she moaned again, her eyes also on her daughter's door. Mr. Spragg's black eyebrows gathered in an angry frown, but it was evident that his anger was not against his wife. "What's the good of Oh Abner-ing? Elmer Moffatt's nothing to us no more'n if we never laid eyes on him." "No I know it; but what's he doing here? Did you speak to him?" she faltered.
But there were hours of solitary striding over bare grassy slopes, face to face with the ironic interrogation of sky and mountains, when his anxieties came back, more persistent and importunate. Sometimes they took the form of merely material difficulties. How, for instance, was he to meet the cost of their ruinous suite at the Engadine Palace while he awaited Mr. Spragg's next remittance?
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.
Spragg's astonishment on learning that his son-in-law contemplated maintaining a household on the earnings of his Muse was still matter for pleasantry between the pair; and one of the humours of their first weeks together had consisted in picturing themselves as a primeval couple setting forth across a virgin continent and subsisting on the adjectives which Ralph was to trap for his epic.
Word Of The Day