Light as an egg-shell, and as fragile, her
three-eighths-inch skin offered no protection from a driving chunk of
ice as small as a man's head. Nor, though the water was open, did she
find a clear way, for the river was full of scattered floes which had
crumbled down from the rim-ice. And here, at once, through skilful
handling, Corliss took to himself confidence in Frona.
It was a great picture: the river rushing blackly between its
crystalline walls; beyond, the green woods stretching upward to touch
the cloud-flecked summer sky; and over all, like a furnace blast, the
hot sun beating down. A great picture, but somehow Corliss's mind
turned to his mother and her perennial tea, the soft carpets, the prim
New England maid-servants, the canaries singing in the wide windows,
and he wondered if she could understand. And when he thought of the
woman behind him, and felt the dip and lift, dip and lift, of her
paddle, his mother's women came back to him, one by one, and passed in
long review,--pale, glimmering ghosts, he thought, caricatures of the
stock which had replenished the earth, and which would continue to
replenish the earth.
La Bijou skirted a pivoting floe, darted into a nipping channel, and
shot out into the open with the walls grinding together behind. Tommy
groaned.
"Well done!" Corliss encouraged.
"The fule wumman!" came the backward snarl.
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