“After twelve,” replied Gil. “We’ll have to hurry a bit.”
“It won’t take us twenty minutes to get back after we’re started,” said Jeffrey. “We’ve got the current with us, you know.”
“That is indeed painful news,” grunted Poke. “I hoped to be able to paddle back.”
“Jeff,” asked Hope as they retraced their steps, “will you teach me to paddle sometime? I’d love to know how. It isn’t hard, is it? It doesn’t look hard, anyway.”
“No, it isn’t hard, except when you’re going against the stream or the wind,” Jeffrey answered. “I’ll show you how any day you like after I get ‘Mike.’”
Hope made a face. “I think that’s a perfectly—perfectly suggy name, Jeff.”
“Suggy? What’s suggy?”
“Horrid, of course.”
“I see; the antonym of jimmy.”