"Their recommending it to everybody as a perfectly harmless story?"
"Good gracious! Is that what they've done?"
Mrs. Fetherel speechlessly nodded.
"Every one of them?"
"Every one—"
"Whew!" said Mrs. Clinch, with an incipient whistle.
"Why, you've just said it yourself!" her cousin suddenly reproached her.
"Said what?"
"That you weren't so awfully shocked—"
"I? Oh, well—you see, you'd keyed me up to such a pitch that it wasn't quite as bad as I expected—"