“Irene.”
“Irene! Why I thought they called her Ireen!”
“So they do—but didn’t you know that that is the American way of pronouncing ‘Irene’?”
“Indeed, I didn’t,” gasped my friend, and in his soul he said “O that I had known!”
The moral of which is that it is very hard to lose one’s love through a mispronunciation.
REVISITING THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON
SID NORTON could not recall a time when he had not been in love. From his earliest boyhood, falling in love had been a habit with him; and his heart, if he might be said to retain possession of an organ that was always being lost to some new face, was a sort of sentimental graveyard, a veritable necropolis of dead love-affairs—dead, but unforgotten; for, incorrigible lover as Sid was, his memory would sometimes go flitting from grave to grave, like a butterfly, philandering even with the past.
In spite of these excursions, and in defiance of the apparent paradox of the statement, Sid Norton found himself in love—for the first and last time. This he said of himself gravely, not only in private to the lady who was credited with this marvel but also in public to his intimate friends. He said it, and there was no doubt that he meant it.