"Sailing east or west?" cried the soldier.
"Sailing east," answered the professor of mathematics, smiling again.
"Then I see how it might happen," the soldier declared.
"Well, I don't," confessed the artist.
The journalist said nothing, as it seemed unprofessional to admit ignorance of anything.
"It is simple enough," the soldier explained. "You see, the world is revolving about the sun steadily, and it is always high noon somewhere on the globe. The day rolls round unceasing, and it is not cut off into twenty-four hours. We happen to have taken the day of Greenwich or Paris as the day of civilization, and we say that it begins earlier in China and later in California; but it is all the same day, we say. Therefore there has to be some place out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where we lose or gain a day—if we are going east, we gain it; if we are going west, we lose it. Now I suppose this little girl of twelve was on her way from some Asiatic port to some American port, and they stopped on their voyage at Honolulu. Perhaps they dropped anchor there just before midnight on their February 28, 1808, thinking that the morrow would be the 29th; but when they were hailed from the shore, just after midnight, they found out that it was already March 1st."
As the soldier finished, he looked at the mathematician for confirmation of his explanation.
Thus appealed to, the professor of mathematics smiled and nodded, and said: "You have hit it. That's just how it was that my grandmother lost the birthday she ought to have had when she was twelve, and had to go four years more without one."
"And so she really didn't have a birthday till she was sixteen!" the artist observed. "Well, all I can say is, your great-grandfather took too many chances. I don't think he gave the child a fair show. I hope he made it up to her when she was sixteen—that's all!"
An hour later The Quartet separated. The soldier and the artist walked away together, but the journalist delayed the mathematician.