The soldier and the artist and the journalist all looked at the professor of mathematics, and they all smiled; but his face remained perfectly grave.
"What's that you say?" asked the journalist. "Sixteen years without a birthday? Isn't that a very large order?"
"Did you know the lady herself?" inquired the soldier.
"She was my grandmother," the mathematician answered. "She had no birthday for the first sixteen years of her life."
"You mean that she did not celebrate her birthdays, I suppose," the artist remarked. "That's nothing. I know lots of families where they don't keep any anniversaries at all."
"No," persisted the mathematician. "I meant what I said, and precisely what I said. My grandmother did not keep her first fifteen birthdays because she couldn't. She didn't have them to keep. They didn't happen. The first time she had a chance to celebrate her birthday was when she completed her sixteenth year—and I need not tell you that the family made the most of the event."
"This a real grandmother you are talking about," asked the journalist, "and not a fairy godmother?"
"I could understand her going without a birthday till she was four years old," the soldier suggested, "if she was born on the 29th of February."
"That accounts for four years," the mathematician admitted, "since my grandmother was born on the 29th of February."
"In what year?" the soldier pursued. "In 1796?"