"Bless my sinful soul!" ejaculated the old lady. "Oh--you tell her, Billy."
Billy shook his head. He was not going to be dragged as far as that. He was sorry for her, but she had had her whistle and she must pay for it. The old lady was beginning again in a weak voice,--
"You see, Electra, that book isn't what you think. It isn't what anybody thinks. I--I made it up."
Electra was about to speak, but her grandmother forestalled her.
"Don't you go and offer me wine. You get it into your head once and for all that I'm telling you a fact and that you've got to believe it. I made up my book of recollections. They're not true, not one of them. As I remember, there isn't one. The letters I wrote myself."
Electra was staring at her in a neutrality which was not even wonder.
Finally she spoke; her awed voice trembled.
Perhaps it was this reverent hesitation which restored Madam Fulton to something of her wonted state.
"For heaven's sake, Electra," she fulminated, "what is there so sacred about Brook Farm? If anybody is going to make up letters from anywhere, why shouldn't it be from there?"
Electra was looking at Billy Stark as if she bade him save her from these shocks or tell her the whole world was rocking. But Billy twirled his eyeglass, and watched it twirling. Finally he had to meet her eye.
"Yes," he said, with a composure he did not feel, "the book is apparently not quite straight--a kind of joke, in fact."
Electra rose. She looked very thoughtful and also, Madam Fulton thought, with a quaking at her guilty heart, rather terrible. She was pinched at the nostrils and white about the lips.
"What I must do first," she was saying, as if to herself, "is to notify the club we cannot possibly have our inquiry afternoon."
"Notify them!" repeated Madam Fulton, in a spasm of fearful admiration. "Are you going to tell all those women?"
Electra included her in that absent glance. Now that there were things to arrange, dates to cancel, topics to consider, she was on her own ground. She spoke with dignity:--
"I shall most certainly tell nobody. A thing like that had better die as soon as possible. I cannot"--she turned upon her grandmother, a look of passionate interrogation on her face--"I cannot understand you."