I just gasps and glances at Vee. What if she should fall for anything like that! Think of smotherin' a baby under most of the alphabet all at one swoop! And imagine a boy strugglin' through schooldays and vacations with all that tied to him. Hemmingway! Why, he'd grow up round-shouldered and knock-kneed, and most likely turn out to be a floor-walker in the white goods department, or the manager of a gift-shop tearoom. Hemmingway! Just the thought of it made me dizzy; and I begun breathin' easier when I saw Vee shake her head. "He's such a little fellow, Auntie," says she. "Wouldn't that be--well, rather topheavy?" Which disposes of Auntie. She admits maybe it would. But from then on, as the news seems to spread that we was havin' a kind of deadlock with the namin' process, the volunteers got busy. Old Leon Battou, our butler-cook, hinted that his choice would be Emil. "For six generations," says he, "Emil has been the name of the first-born son in our family." "That's stickin' to tradition," says I. "It sounds perfectly swell, too, when you know how to pronounce it. But, you see, we're foundin' a new dynasty." Mr. Robert don't say so outright, but he suggests that Ellins Ballard wouldn't be such a bad combination. "True," he adds, "the governor and I deserve no such distinction; but I'm sure we would both be immensely flattered. And there's no telling how reckless we might be when it come to presenting christening cups and that sort of thing." "That's worth rememberin'," says I. "And I expect you wouldn't mind, in case you had a boy to name later on, callin' him Torchy, eh!" Mr. Robert grins. "Entry withdrawn," says he. How this Amelia Gaston Leroy got the call to crash in on our little family affair, though, I couldn't quite dope out. We never suspected before that she was such an intimate friend of ours. Course, since we'd been livin' out in the Piping Rock section we had seen more or less of her--more, as a rule. She was built that way. Oh, yes. Amelia was one of the kind that could bounce in among three or four people in a thirty by forty-five living-room and make the place seem crowded. Mr. Robert's favorite description of her was that one half of Amelia didn't know how the other half lived. To state it plain, Amelia was some whale of a girl. One look at her, and you did no more guessin' as to what caused the food shortage. I got the shock of my life, too, when they told me she was the one that wrote so much of this mushy magazine poetry you see printed. For all the lady poetesses I'd ever seen had been thin, shingled-chested parties with mud-colored hair and soulful eyes. There was nothing thin about Amelia. Her eyes might have been soulful enough at times, but mostly I'd seen 'em fixed on a tray of sandwiches or a plate of layer cake. They'd had her up at the Ellinses' once or twice when they were givin' one of their musical evenin's, and she'd spouted some of her stuff.