"Due principally to the divorce courts and the bankruptcy laws," explained the man illuminatingly. "They're a rum lot out there."
He had never been to America; but the average Briton invariably assumes a wisdom if he has it not, especially when conversing with the dependent sex.
As events turned out, however, Rosamond Veynol didn't change her name again on the twelfth of April. For some reason which was not altogether made clear the wedding was postponed.
The published report was that Miss Veynol was ill, but Miss Veynol was not ill in the least, as a number of eye-witnesses who saw her in Paris, where she was temporarily residing, stood ready to prove.
There was no end of question, naturally, and there was no end of gossip. This condition lasted for three months. And then, to society's intense surprise, it received invitations for the nuptial ceremony at St. Margaret's, Westminster, and for the wedding breakfast at Mrs. Veynol's recently leased establishment in Park Lane.
Lady Bellingdown was up in town for the express purpose of selecting a wedding gift, in which Lord Waltheof had kindly volunteered to assist—"Donty-Down," her lord and master, being in Paris just then—when she chanced upon Nina Darling coming out of a shop in New Bond Street and looking absolutely radiant.
"The widow without a sorrow!" she exclaimed, grasping both her hands and kissing her through her veil. "I called you that the other day, and now I see how well it suits you."
"If it was the other day you were wrong," Nina returned. "But to-day you are right. I feel as free as the robins in St. James's Park. I have just sent the most importunate of Austrian archdukes about his business, and I breathe freely for the first time in six weeks."
"My dear, you are incorrigible. Aren't you ever going to make some deserving man happy?"
"There is no such animal," declared this outrageous flirt. "I am a righteously avenging Nemesis. I dispense to man his just deserts."