“The lawsuits are settled,” she read out⁠ ⁠… “some in my favour, as for example⁠ ⁠… others not. Turkish marriage annulled (I was ambassador in Constantinople, Shel,” she explained). “Children pronounced illegitimate (they said I had three sons by Pepita, a Spanish dancer). So they don’t inherit, which is all to the good.⁠ ⁠… Sex? Ah! what about sex? My sex,” she read out with some solemnity, “is pronounced indisputably, and beyond the shadow of a doubt (what I was telling you a moment ago, Shel?), female. The estates which are now desequestrated in perpetuity descend and are tailed and entailed upon the heirs male of my body, or in default of marriage”⁠—but here she grew impatient with this legal verbiage, and said, “but there won’t be any default of marriage, nor of heirs either, so the rest can be taken as read.” Whereupon she appended her own signature beneath Lord Palmerston’s and entered from that moment into the undisturbed possession of her titles, her house, and her estate⁠—which was now so much shrunk, for the cost of the lawsuits had been prodigious, that, though she was infinitely noble again, she was also excessively poor.