"But no one would think you less respectable for having divorced Wally," said Mary.
"That's all you know, dearie," replied Ermyntrude tartly. "There aren't any flies on me, thanks! What with my having been on the stage, and having the kind of looks I have, I can just hear all the dirty-minded Nosey Parkers saying it was all a put-up job, and Wally doing it to oblige me, just so as I could marry a prince!" Mention of her exalted suitor, and the thoughts of splendour his title conjured up, proved too much for her. She abandoned herself to despair, moaning faintly that she would have to go on being a bird in a golden cage.
Mary could not help laughing at this. "Dear Aunt Ermy, at least the gold is your own! Has the Prince actually asked you to divorce Wally, and marry him?"
"A woman," proclaimed Ermyntrude in throbbing accents, "doesn't need to be told everything in black and white! The Prince is the soul of honour."
"Quite," said Mary dryly. "Does he know that you don't approve of divorce?"
"I had to tell him! I couldn't let him waste his life on me, could I? The might-have-been! Oh, dear, my head feels as though it would split!"
Mary moistened the handkerchief again, and laid it across Ermyntrude's brow. "If you don't mean to divorce Wally, what are you going to do?" she inquired,
"God knows!" responded Ermyntrude, letting her voice sink a tone. She added, more prosaically, but with quite as much feeling: "I'm not going to spend my poor first husband's money buying that creature off, and that's flat!"
"It certainly seems most unfair that you should have to," Mary agreed. "At the same time, won't there be rather a nasty scandal if she isn't provided for?"
"Let him do the providing!" said Ermyntrude, her bosom heaving. "The idea of his expecting his wife to pay off his mistress! Oh, I can't bear it, Mary! I can't go on! What - what, I ask you, does the future hold for me? Neglect and scandal, and me still in my prime, tied hand and foot to a man like Wally! I can see it all! He'll go from bad to worse, drinking himself into his grave, and behaving so that I won't be able to have a housemaid in the place that isn't over sixty and bare-Tipped, just like that nasty old Williams, who led his poor wife such a dance when I first came to live here - before your time, that was, dearie, and personally I always did say and I always shall say that she drove him to it, going about with a face a mile long, and her hair scratched up on the top of her head, and her nose always shiny, and red at the tip, like she did!" She broke off, realising that this reminiscence was not entirely felicitous, and retrieved the situation with a magnificent gesture indicating her own charms. "You can't say Wally's goings-on are my fault!" she said. "Look at me! Thrown away, Mary! Thrown away!"