"I'll be very, very careful. Go on!"
"That old woman—the religious old horror...."
"Yorick—darling!"
"That devout old lady, then!... What about her? Why, there's some reason to suppose, apparently, that she never was respectably married at all to the first wife's father. I am speaking of the Deceased Wife's Sister's sister—Marianne's sister...."
"What a horrid old hypocrite! And she making all that rumpus about Marianne 'living in sin'!"
"Yes—but I wasn't thinking about that.... Don't you see?..."
"Don't I see what?"
"Don't you see that, if it's true, the Deceased Wife's Sister's sister wasn't born in wedlock. So—legally, at any rate—she wasn't her sister at all. Not so much as a half-sister. And she wasn't a Deceased Wife, by hypothesis. Q. E. D. So what was Kate?" Mrs. Athelstan Taylor looked perplexed—evidently thought Kate must have been hard put to it to be there at all.
"Wouldn't Dr. Barham?..." she began.
The Rector filled out the question. "What my young friend Bob calls 'make a great ass of himself'?"