"Yes. The goblins of the mountain are not that bad, but remain bad enough. My husband, Gouty, does have certain qualities of leadership, though he does his best to conceal them. But he has done this tribe one signal favor, though he does not see it that way. He sired as his legitimate heir no male."

Jenny's brow furrowed. "You do not choose your chiefs according to who is best?"

"We do not. The son of the chief will be the next chief. That is one reason I married Gouty: he was the son of a chief. My mother, Goldy, married a lesser chief, one high in the hierarchy but not the leader. She was beautiful, but it was the magic wand that gave her extra appeal, because it enhanced the power of her husband. She passed it on to me so that I could nab a full chief. Thus my son would have been the next chief. Only Gouty dissipated his waning energy with mistresses and lost his ability to summon the stork before providing me with a son. So Gwendolyn is heir to the chiefship and has the chance to improve things greatly in this tribe, because, of course, the goblin women have always been everything the goblin men are not: intelligent, attractive, and decent."

Jenny had seen the difference between Godiva and the goblin males. She had no argument. "So that's good, then."

"I see you still do not appreciate the difficulties. Perhaps there is no concept of infidelity among your people. Do you know what a mistress is?"

"A person who is in charge of something or very good in her work," Jenny said promptly.

Godiva nodded sadly. "I do not like doing this, but I must encroach on the tenets of the Adult Conspiracy in order to make something clear to you. It is forbidden to tell a child how to summon the stork, along with certain related matters. This is why Che Centaur, who is a male child, is forbidden to see your panties."

"But what do panties have to do with storks?" Jenny asked, bewildered.

"I may not answer that. Just accept the fact that no male of any age may see any woman's panties, with the single dubious exception of his wife's. This is not merely goblin protocol, it is Xanth protocol. As for the storks: they bring babies, and no child is permitted to know the mechanism by which the stork is signaled for this purpose."

"But this seems like nonsense to me!" Jenny protested. "Where I come from, there are no—"

"You are not where you came from," Godiva reminded her.

Jenny nodded, realizing that there were whole hosts of ways in which she was ignorant of the ways of this land.