"I don't want to sound unsympathetic, Aunt Ermy, but after all, you've known what Wally is for ages. Let me bring you up some tea, and some thin toast, and you'll feel better."
"I couldn't touch a morsel!" said Ermyntrude. "You know what I get like when Wally's upset me. Feel how burning hot I am! I shall probably be ill for a week. That's the worst of having an artist's temperament: one suffers for it."
If Ermyntrude contemplated extending a nerve-crisis over a week, Mary could not help feeling that the other inmates of the house would suffer to an almost equal extent. She agreed that Ermyntrude was certainly in a high fever, and refrained from pointing out that the day was bidding fair to be a very hot one, and that a fat, satincovered eiderdown might well be expected to make anyone burning hot. She offered to ring up Dr Chester's house, and to ask him to call.
This suggestion found favour. "Tell him to bring me a sedative," said Ermyntrude in a fading voice. "I couldn't bear anyone else near me, but Maurice always understands. He's the kind of man I can talk to."
Mary went away to perform this mission. While she would naturally have preferred Ermyntrude not to talk of her present difficulties to anybody, she was not a girl who expected impossibilities, and she considered that if Ermyntrude wished to unburden herself further it had better be to Maurice Chester, who had known her for many years, than to the Prince, or to Robert Steel.
She found Vicky hanging up the receiver of the telephone in the hall. Vicky had enlivened the Sabbath by coming down to breakfast in abbreviated tennisshorts, and a sleeveless shirt. She said, when she saw Mary: "Oh, hallo! That was that corrosive Harold White. I do think he's getting awfully redundant, don't you?"
"What does he want this time?"
"Wally. It's getting to be a habit with him. I say, would it be heartless, or anything, if I went and played tennis? Because I've told White to send Alan over. I quite meant to be a Comfort-to-Mother, in pale-blue organdie, but she rather turned her face to the wall."
"No, much better leave her alone. I'm going to ask Maurice to come and see her. You might have invited Janet, too. Then you could have had a four, with the Prince."
"Yes, I might, but I thought not. She's got such fuzzy edges. I think she's out of focus. Besides, she's going to church. I've asked Alexis to come and play, though, which is definitely a Sundayish sort of thing for me to have done, because as a matter of fact I've got frightfully tired of him."