"Oh, certainly, please call me Mary," she begged him nervously.
"Thank you, Mary."
Mr. Alison wished that he could quote a line of poetry about some romantic Mary; but he could only think of Mary had a little lamb. And he felt that to sigh this forth with as much passionate emphasis as he could achieve would sound rather silly.
"I suppose," he ventured, "you couldn't bring yourself to call me Jemmie? All my chums call me Jemmie. Jemmie Alison. Nobody ever calls me James. Nobody ever did call me James except my grandmother on my father's side. Funny old woman. She simply would not call me Jemmie. She always said the name reminded her of a fright she had in childhood when some burglars broke into her father's house, who of course would have been my great-grandfather. Now that's going back some way. My father died in '72. He was sixty-three then. So he was born in 1809, when my grandmother was twenty-one. That makes her born in 1788. So I suppose this burglary must have happened about 1798. That's a long time ago, isn't it?"
"A very long time ago," Mary agreed. She was so much muddled by Mr. Alison's statistics that if he had told her the burglary took place shortly after the Battle of Hastings she would have accepted it as a fact.
"I wish the old lady could have lived to meet you, Mary," he went on. "You are just the kind of girl she would have liked me to marry."
Luckily for Mary, who did not know what comment she ought to make on this last piece of information, by this time the tenor was off again:
Do you grieve no costly offering
To the lady you can make?
One there is, and gifts less worthy
Queens have stooped to take.
Take a Heart of virgin silver,
Fashion it with heavy blows,
Cast it into Love's hot furnace
When it fiercest glows.
"Is that your heart or mine?" Mr. Alison asked in a puzzled voice. "I don't quite get that. I mean, is that his heart or hers?"