Miss Winchester, somewhat confused by the rapidity of Adele’s jumps from place to place in mental travelling, but as responsively elastic as either of the others, took several turns in her office-chair while the others were chatting; but when they landed her among the Himalaya mountains as part of the journey, she gasped for utterance:
“Bless me! You take my breath away.”
“Never mind! Catch it again. Oh, do please! Please do! and come along!”
“But you must give me time to think,” and Miss Winchester began cogitating how she would turn an apparent impossibility into an assured fact.
“Oh, don’t think too much,” exclaimed Adele, when the result of thinking looked precarious. “Just do it,—why, don’t you see? The opportunity of our lives! We shall learn so much.”
Now it so happened, the circumstances being favorable, that Adele’s last appeal touched upon a matter in Miss Winchester’s past experience, and excited a far more potent incentive to join the party than any amount of contagious enthusiasm could ever have accomplished.
Miss Winchester had not long before published a successful novel based upon results of travel, including character sketches, the result of careful observation amid episodes of ordinary life. She had given it the whimsical title of “Upside Down.” Now what could possibly be more opportune than to follow this with others,—say on “Downside Up,” or, better still, “Outside and Inside”? And where could more be found of circumstantial interest than in the Orient? Who knows!—it might lead to still another, “Turned Inside Out,” for the East undoubtedly had many examples of that sort of thing. Being already a member of the literary craft, the opportunity was altogether too good to be lost, every nerve must be strained to reach the other side. It goes without saying that the Chairman of the Persuasion Committee was caught dancing an impromptu tarantelle when Miss Winchester finally told them it might, possibly might, be arranged.
“Oh, then it’s settled positively,” exclaimed Adele; “for if you hesitate you’re lost.”
Paul thought Adele a little witch as she danced with glee, all the time encouraging her friend. He remembered how Adele had bewitched himself also not long before, when she was in quite another mood. Paul laughed outright, but could not keep his eyes from noticing her every movement.
As to Miss Winchester, she took hold of the problem with a vim characteristic of some of the characters of her own creation; she tackled at once the ubiquitous problem known to all men on both sides of the globe as, “How to make both ends meet,” and of course solved it satisfactorily. Some few of the craft-literary, and in some degree all women of whatever persuasion, usually do. So Adele was right,—that settled it. Miss Winchester finally saw her way clear, and joined their party.