“I have heard him say so,” I responded, perhaps not over graciously.
“O, regularly, for a number of weekly papers. It is understood that quite frequently he gets paid—not of course that that matters to him—but his associations are distinctly literary. I have always felt that with his tastes and connections his wife—granting of course that she was the right kind of woman—might at last set up a real literary salon in London. We have wanted one so long, you know.”
“Have we?” I murmured listlessly, striving all the while to guess what relation all this bore to the question of Ermyntrude. I built up in my mind a hostile picture of the odious Hump, with his shoulders sloping off like a German wine-bottle, his lean neck battlemented in high starched walls of linen, and his foolish conceited face—and leaped hopefully to the conclusion that Ermyntrude had rejected him. I could not keep the notion to myself.
“Well—has she sent him about his business?” I asked, making ready to beam with delight.
“No,” said Mrs Albert, ruefully. “It never got to that, so far as I can gather—but at all events it is all over. I expect every morning now to read the announcement in the Morning Post that a marriage has been arranged between him and—and—Miss Wallaby!”
I sat upright, and felt myself smiling. “What!—the girl with the black ribbon round her neck?” I asked comfortably.
“It would be more appropriate round her heart,” remarked Mrs Albert, with bitterness in her tone. “Why, do you know? her mother, for all that she’s Lady Wallaby, hasn’t an ‘h’ in her whole composition.”
“Well, neither has old Sir Watkyn Hump,” I rejoined pleasantly. “So it’s a fair exchange.”
“Ah, but he can afford it,” put in Mrs Albert. “But the Wallabys—well, I can only say that I had a right to look for different treatment at their hands. How, do you suppose, they would ever have been asked to the Hon. Mrs Coon-Alwyn’s garden-party, or met Lady Thames-Ditton, or been put in society generally, if I had not taken an interest in them? Why, that girl’s father, old Sir Willoughby Wallaby, was never anything but chief of police, or something like that, out in some Australian convict settlement. I have heard he was knighted by mistake, but of course my lips are sealed.”
“I suppose they really have behaved badly,” I said, half interrogatively.