The word seemed to snap the last thread of their incredulity. “And of its great length,” gasped Mrs. Ballinger.
“She said it was awfully deep, and you couldn’t skip—you just had to wade through,” Miss Glyde added.
The idea worked its way more slowly through Mrs. Plinth’s compact resistances. “How could there be anything improper about a river?” she enquired.
“Improper?”
“Why, what she said about the source—that it was corrupt?”
“Not corrupt, but hard to get at,” Laura Glyde corrected. “Some one who’d been there had told her so. I daresay it was the explorer himself—doesn’t it say the expedition was dangerous?”
“‘Difficult and dangerous,’” read Miss Van Vluyck.
Mrs. Ballinger pressed her hands to her throbbing temples. “There’s nothing she said that wouldn’t apply to a river—to this river!” She swung about excitedly to the other members. “Why, do you remember her telling us that she hadn’t read ‘The Supreme Instant’ because she’d taken it on a boating party while she was staying with her brother, and some one had ‘shied’ it overboard—‘shied’ of course was her own expression.”
The ladies breathlessly signified that the expression had not escaped them.
“Well—and then didn’t she tell Osric Dane that one of her books was simply saturated with Xingu? Of course it was, if one of Mrs. Roby’s rowdy friends had thrown it into the river!”