was, if some of Mrs. Roby’s rowdy friends had thrown it into the river!”
This surprising reconstruction of the scene in which they had just participated left the members of the Lunch Club inarticulate. At length Mrs. Plinth, after visibly labouring with the problem, said in a heavy tone: “Osric Dane was taken in too.”
Mrs. Leveret took courage at this. “Perhaps that’s what Mrs. Roby did it for. She said Osric Dane was a brute, and she may have wanted to give her a lesson.”
Miss Van Vluyck frowned. “It was hardly worth while to do it at our expense.”
“At least,” said Miss Glyde with a touch of bitterness, “she succeeded in interesting her, which was more than we did.”
“What chance had we?” rejoined Mrs. Ballinger. “Mrs. Roby monopolised her from the first. And THAT, I’ve no doubt, was her purpose—to give Osric Dane a false impression of her own standing in the Club. She would hesitate at nothing to attract attention: we all know how she took in poor Professor Foreland.”
“She actually makes him give bridge-teas every Thursday,” Mrs. Leveret piped up.
Laura Glyde struck her hands together. “Why, this is Thursday, and it’s THERE she’s gone, of course; and taken Osric with her!”
“And they’re shrieking over us at this moment,” said Mrs. Ballinger between her teeth.
This possibility seemed too preposterous to be admitted. “She would hardly dare,” said Miss Van Vluyck, “confess the imposture to Osric Dane.”
“I’m not so sure: I thought I saw her make a sign as she left. If she hadn’t made a sign, why should Osric Dane have rushed out after her?”
“Well, you know, we’d all been telling her how wonderful Xingu was, and she said she wanted to find out more about it,” Mrs. Leveret said, with a tardy impulse of justice to the absent.
This reminder, far from mitigating the wrath of the other members, gave it a stronger impetus.
“Yes—and that’s exactly what they’re both laughing over now,” said Laura Glyde ironically.
Mrs. Plinth stood up and gathered her expensive furs about her monumental form. “I have no wish to criticise,” she said; “but unless the Lunch Club can protect its members against the recurrence of such—such unbecoming scenes, I for one—”
“Oh, so do I!” agreed Miss Glyde, rising also.
Miss Van Vluyck closed the Encyclopaedia and proceeded to button herself into her jacket. “My time is really too valuable—” she began.
“I fancy we are all of one mind,” said Mrs. Ballinger, looking searchingly at Mrs. Leveret, who looked at the others.
“I always deprecate anything like a scandal—” Mrs. Plinth continued.
“She has been the cause of one to-day!” exclaimed Miss Glyde.
Mrs. Leveret moaned: “I don’t see how she COULD!” and Miss Van Vluyck said, picking up her note-book: “Some women stop at nothing.”
“—but if,” Mrs. Plinth took up her argument impressively, “anything of the kind had happened in MY house” (it never would have, her tone implied), “I should have felt that I owed it to myself either to ask for Mrs. Roby’s resignation—or to offer mine.”
“Oh, Mrs. Plinth—” gasped the Lunch Club.
“Fortunately for me,” Mrs. Plinth continued with an awful magnanimity, “the matter was taken out of my hands by our President’s decision that the right to entertain distinguished guests was a privilege vested in her office; and I think the other members will agree that, as she was alone in this opinion, she ought to be alone in deciding on the best way of effacing its—its really deplorable consequences.”
A deep silence followed this unexpected outbreak of Mrs. Plinth’s long-stored resentment.
“I don’t see why I should be expected to ask her to resign—” Mrs. Ballinger at length began; but Laura Glyde turned back to remind her: “You know she made you say that you’d got on swimmingly in Xingu.”
An ill-timed giggle escaped from Mrs. Leveret, and Mrs. Ballinger energetically continued “—but you needn’t think for a moment that I’m afraid to!”
The door of the drawing-room closed on the retreating backs of the Lunch Club, and the President of that distinguished association, seating herself at her writing-table, and pushing away a copy of “The Wings of Death” to make room for her elbow, drew forth a sheet of the club’s note-paper, on which she began to write: “My dear Mrs. Roby—”
The End of Xingu
THE VERDICT
June 1908
I had always thought Jack Gisburn rather a cheap genius—though a good fellow enough—so it was no great surprise to me to hear that, in the height of his glory, he had dropped his painting, married a rich widow, and established himself in a villa on the Riviera. (Though I rather thought it would have been Rome or Florence.)
“The height of his glory”—that was what the women called it. I can hear Mrs. Gideon Thwing—his last Chicago sitter—deploring his unaccountable abdication. “Of course it’s going to send the value of my picture ‘way up; but I don’t think of that, Mr. Rickham—the loss to Arrt is all I think of.” The word, on Mrs. Thwing’s lips, multiplied its RS as though they were reflected in an endless vista of mirrors. And it was not only the Mrs. Thwings who mourned. Had not the exquisite Hermia Croft, at the last Grafton Gallery show, stopped me before Gisburn’s “Moon-dancers” to say, with tears in her eyes: “We shall not look upon its like again”?
Well!—even through the prism of Hermia’s tears I felt able to face the fact with equanimity. Poor Jack Gisburn! The women had made him—it was fitting that they should mourn him. Among his own sex fewer regrets were heard, and in his own trade hardly a murmur. Professional jealousy? Perhaps. If it were, the honour of the craft was vindicated by little Claude Nutley, who, in all good faith, brought out in the Burlington a very handsome “obituary”
