"Have you nothing to say for yourself?" demanded Mrs. Belknap-Jackson,
also in a voice hoarse with emotion. I glanced at her husband. He,
too, was pale with anger and trembling, so that I fancied he dared not
trust himself to speak.
"The wretched man," declared Mrs. Effie, addressing them all, "simply
can't realize--how disgraceful it is. Oh, we shall never be able to
live it down!"
"Imagine those flippant Spokane sheets dressing up the thing," hissed
Belknap-Jackson, speaking for the first time. "Imagine their
blackguardly humour!"
"And that awful Cousin Egbert," broke in Mrs. Effie, pointing a
desperate finger toward him. "Think of the laughing-stock he'll
become! Why, he'll simply never be able to hold up his head again."
"Say, you listen here," exclaimed Cousin Egbert with sudden heat;
"never you mind about my head. I always been able to hold up my head
any time I felt like it." And again to me he threw out, "Don't you let
'em bluff you, Bill!"
"I gave him a notice for the paper," explained Mrs. Effie plaintively;
"I'd written it all nicely out to save them time in the office, and
that would have prevented this disgrace, but he never gave it in."
"I clean forgot it," declared the offender. "What with one thing and
another, and gassing back and forth with some o' the boys, it kind of
went out o' my head.
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