The Queen was very much perturbed by the King’s altered behaviour towards her, and she took Sir Robert Walpole into her confidence, and asked him what was to be done. Walpole spoke to her with a frankness positively brutal. He told her that since the King had tasted “better things,” presumably the Walmoden, it could not be other than it was; he reminded the Queen that she was no longer young, and said that “she should no longer depend upon her person, but her head, for her influence, as the one would now be of little use to her, and the other could never fail her.” No woman likes to be told that her personal charms are gone, and Walpole made this advice the more unpalatable by recommending the Queen to send for Lady Tankerville, a good looking but stupid woman, to fill the place left vacant by Lady Suffolk. He told the Queen that it was absolutely necessary that the King should have some one to amuse him, “as he could not spend his evenings with his own daughters after having tasted the sweets of passing them with other people’s”; therefore, it would be much better that he should have some one chosen by the Queen than by himself. Lady Deloraine, who was the other likely candidate for the royal favour, and whom the King had often noticed when she was governess to the young Princesses, Walpole regarded as a dangerous woman, and therefore preferred Lady Tankerville. The Queen resented this advice in her heart, and was deeply hurt; but on the surface she took it well enough, laughing the matter off as was her wont. She was not above making some bitter jokes upon the situation in which she found herself. When she was dressed for the King’s birthday drawing-room, she pointed to her head-dress and said: “I think I am extremely fine too, though _un peu à la mode_; I think they have given me horns.” Whereupon Walpole burst into a coarse laugh, and said he thought the tire-woman must be a wag. The Queen laughed too, but flushed angrily.