Sagner's jaw-bones stiffened instantly. "Oh, yes," he exclaimed. "Oh, yes, of course I understand Life. That is," he added, with a most unusual burst of humility, "I understand everything, I think, except just why the gills of a fish--but, oh, bother, you wouldn't know what I meant; and there's a new French theory about odylic forces that puzzles me a little, and I never, never have been able to understand the particular mental processes of a woman who violates the law of species by naming her firstborn son for any man but his father. I'm not exactly criticising the fish," he added vehemently, "nor the new odylic theory, nor even the woman; I'm simply stating baldly and plainly the only three things under God's heaven that I can't quite seem to fathom." "What's all this got to do with Mary Lennart?" I asked impatiently. "Nothing at all to do with Mary Lennart," he answered proudly. "Mary Lennart's son is named Harold." He began to smoke very hard. "Considering the real object of our being put here in the world," he resumed didactically, "it has always seemed to me that the supreme test of character lay in the father's and mother's mental attitude toward their young." "Couldn't you say 'toward their children'?" I protested. He brushed my interruption aside. "I don't care," he persisted, "how much a man loves a woman or how much a woman loves a man--the man who deserts his wife during her crucial hour and goes off on a lark to get out of the fuss, and the woman who names her firstborn son for any man except his father, may qualify in all the available moral tenets, but they certainly have slipped up somehow, mentally, in the Real Meaning of things. Thank God," he finished quickly, "that neither Harold Lennart nor Mary has failed the other like that--no matter what else happens." His face whitened. "I stayed with Harold Lennart the night little Harold was born," he whispered rather softly. Before I could think of just the right thing to say, he jumped up awkwardly and strode over to the looking-glass, and puffed out his great chest and stood and stared at himself. "I wish I had a son named Bertus Sagner," he said. "It's all right, of course, to have him named after you," I laughed, "but you surely wouldn't choose to have him look like you, would you?" He turned on me with absurd fierceness. "I wouldn't marry any woman who didn't love me enough to want her son to look like me!" he exclaimed.