Pauline shrank back. Would people never stop trying to show her disgusting photographs? She articulated: "You haven't seen Fanny Lindon too?"
"Haven't I? She spent the morning here. She told Amalasuntha everything."
Pauline, with a great effort, controlled her rising anger. "How idiotic! Now it will be spread to all the winds!" She saw Fanny and Amalasuntha gloatingly exchanging the images of their progenies' dishonour. It was too indecent ... and the old New Yorker was as shameless as the demoralized foreigner.
"I didn't know Fanny had been here before me. I've just left her. I've been trying to persuade her to stop; to hush up the whole business before it's too late. I suppose you gave her the same advice?"
Wyant's face clouded: he looked perplexedly at his former wife, and she saw he had lost all sense of the impropriety and folly of the affair in his famished enjoyment of its spicy details.
"I don't know—I understood it was too late; and that Manford was urging them to do it."
Pauline made a slight movement of impatience. "Dexter—of course! When he sees a 'case'! I suppose lawyers are all alike. At any rate, I can't make him understand..." She broke off, suddenly aware that the rôles were reversed, and that for the first time she was disparaging her second husband to her first. "Besides," she hurried on, "it's no affair of Dexter's if the Lindons choose to dishonour their child publicly. They're not his relations; Bee is not his cousin's daughter. But you and I—how can we help feeling differently? Bee and Nona and Jim were all brought up together. You must help me to stop this scandal! You must send for Grant Lindon at once. He's sure to listen to you ... you've always had a great influence on Grant..."
She found herself, in her extremity, using the very arguments she had addressed to Manford, and she saw at once that in this case they were more effective. Wyant drew himself up stiffly with a faint smile of satisfaction. Involuntarily he ran a thin gouty hand through his hair, and tried for a glimpse of himself in the mirror.
"Think so—really? Of course when Grant was a boy he used to consider me a great fellow. But now ... who remembers me in my dingy corner?"
Pauline rose with her clear wintry smile. "A good many of us, it seems. You tell me I'm the third lady to call on you today! You know well enough, Arthur—" she brushed the name in lightly, on the extreme tip of her smile—"that the opinion of people like you still counts in New York, even in these times. Imagine what your mother would have felt at the idea of Fanny and Bee figuring in all the daily headlines, with reporters and photographers in a queue on the doorstep! I'm glad she hasn't lived to see it."