“But you said you had been to—to Africa, was it?—three or four times.”
“Oh, but those were my Abyssinian trips. Abyssinia isn't wild, or dangerous, any more than Egypt.”
“Oh, isn't it?”
“No, not in the least, really. Oh, dear me, no!”
“Not with darky camel drivers stealin' your—er—underclothes and goodness knows what? It sounds a little wild to ME.”
“Oh, but it isn't, I assure you. And Egypt—ah—Egypt is a wonderful country. On my most recent trip I.... May I tell you?”
He began to tell her without waiting for permission. For the next hour Martha Phipps journeyed afar, under an African sun, over desert sands, beside a river she had read of in her geography when a girl, under palm trees, amid pyramids and temples and the buried cities of a buried people. And before her skipped, figuratively speaking, the diminutive figure of Galusha Bangs, guiding, pointing, declaiming, describing, the incarnation of enthusiastic energy, as different as anything could be from the mild, dreamy little person who had sat opposite her at the supper table so short a time before.
The wooden clock on the mantel—it had wooden works and Martha wound it each night before she went to bed—banged its gong ten times. Mr. Bangs descended from Egypt as if he had fallen from a palm tree, alighting upon reality and Cape Cod with startled suddenness.
“Oh, dear me!” he cried. “What was that? Goodness me, it CAN'T be ten o'clock, can it? Oh, I must have talked you almost to death, Miss Phipps. I must have bored you to distraction, I must really. Oh, I'm SO sorry!”
Miss Martha also seemed to be coming out of a dream, or trance. She stirred in her chair.