“I thought I did when you said so,” Laura Glyde avowed.
“I said so?” cried Mrs. Ballinger.
“Yes. You said it had crowded everything else out of your mind.”
“Well you said it had changed your whole life!”
“For that matter. Miss Van Vluyck said she had never grudged the time she’d given it.”
Mrs. Plinth interposed: “I made it clear that I knew nothing whatever of the original.”
Mrs. Ballinger broke off the dispute with a groan. “Oh, what does it all matter if she’s been making fools of us? I believe Miss Van Vluyck’s right—she was talking of the river all the while!”
“How could she? It’s too preposterous,” Miss Glyde exclaimed.
“Listen.” Miss Van Vluyck had repossessed herself of the Encyclopaedia, and restored her spectacles to a nose reddened by excitement. “‘The Xingu, one of the principal rivers of Brazil, rises on the plateau of Mato Grosso, and flows in a northerly direction for a length of no less than one thousand one hundred and eighteen miles, entering the Amazon near the mouth of the latter river. The upper course of the Xingu is auriferous and fed by numerous branches. Its source was first discovered in 1884 by the German explorer von den Steinen, after a difficult and dangerous expedition through a region inhabited by tribes still in the Stone Age of culture.’”
The ladies received this communication in a state of stupefied silence from which Mrs. Leveret was the first to rally. “She certainly did speak of its having branches.”