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has come, I am surprised that it has not come sooner. Looking at myself dispassionately, I can not help coming to the conclusion that I must be a most exasperating man to live with in close contact for any long period.
    And we are good friends again, too. By “good friends” I mean good friends, neither more nor less. It has been forced home on me lately how great is the debt that this year owes ten years ago for the invention of the expression “old thing.” It is familiar and friendly and non-committal. A woman can call herhusband “old thing” and show him that she is still fond of him and yet she would rather—well, that she would rather he spent his nights in his study. And the husband can call his wife “old thing” and by those two words can imply—“Right-ho, dear. I’ve got a fairly good idea of what you are feeling like, and I think I understand. Don’t let it worry you—but—but—I am just a
little
bit anxious.”
    Constance and I call each other “old thing” nowadays. “Dear” finds no place in our conversation, except very occasionally when one slips in by accident. When that happens there is a queer little guilty pause in the conversation. It was one of those which checked us this evening just when we were drawing near a sane and calm discussion of our trouble. We never had another opportunity of reopening the matter, which is rather a pity. I can stand this waiting myself, but I am terrified in case Constance should find it a strain. But now that Constance has gone to bed there is nothing I can do in the matter today. I can only sit here in my study and dream. Dreaming and thinking and scribbling—and remembering
    I have never been able to understand why Constancewould persist in calling him—or her—“Baby John.” John as a Christian name for babies has reached the over-ripeness of its popularity. It was
vieux feu
. About it there clung (to me, at least) a flavor of the distinctly ordinary, even of vulgarity. I may have been prejudiced by the fact that one of the wretched weekly papers for women was running a series of articles on much the same subject, and made a point of calling the expected child under discussion either “Baby John” or “the little stranger.” That Constance was not deterred by such an example showed either incredible bad taste (and Constance has very good taste as a rule) or else a strength of mind which positively alarmed me. To this day I do not know which it was, and in time it happened that I grew reconciled to the name. I came to associate it with a softness in Constance’s eyes and a little distant half-smile round her lips, and with long pleasant evenings by the fire while Constance stitched and knitted, and I sat and dreamed—or read those “Baby John” articles in a desperate endeavor to remedy my ignorance of matters maternal. Yet I think I would have liked him to have the same name as myself.
    Constance was proud, and I believe she was happy. Just once or twice I found myself troubled by doubts as to whether I was really doing the world a service by summoning into it a being who was bound to inherit some of my characteristics, and once or twice I wondered whether, after all, Baby John would have much reason to be grateful for my casual condemnation of him to a lifetime in this vale of tears, but Constance knew no such scruples. The only time I had ventured to hint at them to her she looked at me wide-eyed and wondering.
    â€œDo you think he
won’t
be grateful, then, dear?” she asked.
    â€œI didn’t say that. I only said that perhaps he might not be.”
    â€œBut why shouldn’t he be?”
    â€œWell, some folk aren’t. You often hear of people wishing they had never been born.”
    â€œBut they don’t mean it,” said Constance. “And John won’t ever think he means it, either.”
    In the face