“It’s very easy to play with words and metaphors and analogies. You can make them appear to prove anything. As a matter of fact, we’ve both been subjected to the organic changes of twenty years. I can no more become the girl of eighteen than I can become the child of eight or the baby eight months old.” Baltazar put his hands in his pockets, laughed, turned away, and sat down again in his chair. “We seem to have got on to the basis of a nice and interminable discussion. Let us get off it for the present. We have plenty of time. If I’m anything at all, I’m a man of illimitable patience.” She laughed out loud. She could not help it. A typhoon proclaiming its Zephyrdom! And proclaiming it not jestingly, but with the accent of deeply rooted conviction. “You? You patient? Oh, my dear——” “There,” he cried, jumping up from his chair. “You have called me ‘my dear’!” Quickly she retorted: “I didn’t. At least, I didn’t mean to. You caught me up in your patient way. I was going to call you my dear something—my dear sir—my dear man——” “My name happens to be John,” said Baltazar. “‘My dear John’? No. I wasn’t going to say that.” “Why?” “It sounds as if we had been married for twenty years.” With feminine instinct she had put her foot on his man’s vanity and had used it, like a rock climber, as a projection to mount to safety. She saw him uncertain, unhumorous, and felt pleasurably conscious of advantage gained. “You said it twenty years ago, at any rate.” She sat up victoriously in her chair. “I didn’t. Never. I don’t think I had the courage to call you anything. Certainly not John. I never even thought of you as John. As a label you were John Baltazar. But not John—_tout court_—like that. Oh no!” “I suppose you’re right,” said Baltazar. “It’s a damned name. It’s everything that’s dull and prosaic in the English genius concentrated into one uninspiring vocable. Unlike other idiot names, it has no pleasing diminutive. ‘Johnnie’ is insulting. ‘Jack’ is Adelphi melodrama. Thank God I’ve been spared both. Now I burst upon you, after twenty years, as ‘John,’ and you naturally receive the idea with derision.” “Oh, it’s not as bad as that,” she cried. “Look at the great men of your name. John of Gaunt, John Knox, John Bunyan, John Locke, John Stuart Mill——” “A merry crew of troubadours, aren’t they?” said Baltazar.