She did stop to marvel, however, as to whether her husband had given more than one name to the baby. She had intended his second name should be St. Leger. But her husband was so absent-minded, she presumed to say that he had forgotten all about it. Upon questioning him he looked up somewhat confused.
"I had indeed forgotten your intention. I do remember now of having heard you speak of St. Leger; I do remember."
"So you had him christened without a middle name, plain John Temple! I wonder you didn't go to the length of giving him your own name in full, John Patrick Temple!"
"That I did do, my dear; it was my father's name, and I never thought but what it had been all settled between us."
This was too much for Juliet's patience, already tried. She stamped her feet, wrung her hands, and cried aloud despairingly.
When, at length, able to articulate, she poured upon John Temple's ears such a shower of words as must have refreshed the very springs of his nature. She concluded thus:
"You are the most set, stupid, obstinate man in this world, and selfish too. It was not enough that I should have given him your old-fashioned, homely, plain name of John, when Alphonsus, Adolphus, or Rinaldo would have suited me so much better, but you must put in that low, vulgar, most hateful of all names—Patrick! A Patrick in our own house, for our only child! By and bye, he will be going by the name of Pat. My child—the son of a St. Leger—baptized by a Catholic priest and called Pat, just like the dozen other infant nobodies he had baptized the same day, no doubt. Nothing to distinguish him from the vulgar herd—a paddy among paddies! O John Temple, I wish I had never seen your face and eyes!"
John Temple seized hurriedly his hat, and without a word went out from the presence of his wife. To say that he was not angry would be untrue. Above his anger, however, swelled emotions of surprise and wonder. Surprise and wonder that the beautiful Juliet St. Leger, during six months of intimate courtship, so successfully could have veiled, under constant guise of amiability, the weak, pettish nature which she was now so often exhibiting.
Of a truth, he had been simple enough to become attracted by her exceeding beauty of face and figure; but these accidents would never have held a man of his sterling sense and uprightness had he not been led to believe it associated with a corresponding beauty of mind and disposition.
For a brief while this strong man yielded to an overwhelming sense of loss and regret. The memory of his excellent mother came back, by comparison, to increase his painful confusion.