"Patient, if you please, Madam."
"Patient—not Patience?"
"I was not baptized Patience, Madam. My father was a Scottish Covenanter, and he named me, his first-born child, 'The-Patient-Waiting-for-Christ.'"
"What a strange name!" involuntarily exclaimed Celia.
"Yes, Madam; very strange, I doubt not, to such as have never met with our Puritan practice of Scripture-text names. I have known divers such."
"Do the Puritans, then, commonly give their children such names?"
"Very often, Madam. I had an aunt who was called 'We-Love-Him-Because-He-First-Loved-Us.'"
"They called her Love for short, I suppose?"
"Yes, Madam," answered Patient, in her calm, passive manner.
Celia thought this very odd indeed, and turned the conversation, lest she should get comic associations with texts of Scripture of which she could not afterwards divest herself. She wondered that Patient did not feel the ludicrous strangeness of the practice, not knowing that all sense of the ludicrous had been left out of Patient's composition.