The Custom of the Country

by Edith Wharton

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.

"How on earth do you know what I thought?" Undine flashed back, her grey eyes darting warnings at her mother under their straight black brows.

Mrs. Heeny smiled indulgently on her hearers. "I know everybody. If they don't know ME they ain't in it, and Claud Walsingham Popple's in it. But he ain't nearly AS in it," she continued judicially, "as Ralph Marvell—the

"Do you mean to say Mr. Marvell's as swell as Mr. Popple?" "As swell? Why, Claud Walsingham Popple ain't in the same class with him!" The girl was upon her mother with a spring, snatching and smoothing out the crumpled note.

Undine's face lit up as if a shaft of sunset had struck it through the triple-curtained windows of the Stentorian.

She's never seen me!" Her tone implied that she had long been accustomed to being "wanted" by those who had.

throwing back her head she read, in a slow unpunctuated chant: