“Didn’t you know? At the club and downtown nowadays they speak of your husband as the ‘Earl of Ornaby.’ You may not have noticed it, but he sometimes mentions a place called Ornaby Addition. Now that he’s got another subject though, I suspect his title ought to be changed to ‘Father of the Heir to Ornaby.’ Doesn’t that seem more intriguing, if I may employ the expression?”
“Most intriguing!” she agreed. “But since my husband’s the ‘Earl,’ am I called the ‘Countess of Ornaby’?”
“No; they leave you out of it, and I’m afraid you’ll be left out of it again if the new title’s conferred on him. No one would get an idea from his orations that the Heir to Ornaby has a mother. A father would seem to be Henry Daniel’s sole and total ancestry.” Then, as she laughed again, Fred added his unfortunate afterthought. “No; I forgot. I believe he does include a godmother as a sort of secondary necessity.”
“Does he? We haven’t talked about who’s to be the godmother yet. We haven’t selected one.”
“ ‘We?’ ” Fred repeated, affecting surprise. “You seem to think you have something to do with it! Perhaps when the father of the Heir to Ornaby gets around to it, he may condescend to inform you that the godmother was selected the very night after the heir was born.”
“Was she?” Lena laughed. “Where? At the club?”
“Goodness, no! Don’t you know where Dan went that night?”
“Just to the club, didn’t he?” Lena said cheerfully, a little surprised. “That’s all I heard mentioned about it afterwards, at least.”
“Ah, they cover up these things from you, I see. It’s time somebody warned you of what’s going on.” And Fred was inspired to add: “Haven’t you realized yet there’s an enchantress living right next door to you?”
From the young man’s own point of view, this was foolery altogether harmless: Martha Shelby was almost “one of the family”—so near to being one of them, in fact, that he would not have been at all surprised to find her included in this family party—and the episode of his call upon her, with his cousin, upon the night after the baby’s birth, seemed to him of no other than a jocose significance. Like Dan’s “speech” to Martha, it merely illustrated the hare-brained condition of a new-made father, and in that light was handy material for a family dinner-table humorist.