"Do you know," says she, "I have just thought of the loveliest name for your dear baby."
"Oh, have you?" says I, sort of crisp.
"Yes," says she, "and I simply couldn't wait until morning to tell you. Now listen—it's Ethelbert."
"Ethel-Bert!" says I, gaspy. "Say, you know he's no mixed foursome."
"No, no," says she. Ethelbert—one name, after the old Saxon king. Ethelbert Ballard. "Isn't that just perfect? And I am so glad it came to me."
I couldn't agree with her real enthusiastic, so it's lucky she hung up just as she did.
"Huh!" I remarks to Vee. "Why not Maryjim or Daisybill? Say, I think our friend Amelia must have gone off her hinge."
But Vee only yawns and advises me to go to sleep and forget it. Well, I tried. You know how it is, though, when you've been jolted out of the feathers just as you're halfway through the first reel of the slumber stuff. I couldn't get back, to save me.
I counted sheep jumpin' over a wall, I tried lookin' down a railroad track until I could seen the rails meet, and I spelled Constantinople backwards. Nothing doing in the Morpheus act.
I was wider awake then than a new taxi driver makin' his first trip up Broadway. I could think of swell names for seashore cottages, for new surburban additions, and for other people's babies. I invented an explosive pretzel that would win the war. I thought of bills I ought to pay next week sure, and of what I meant to tell the laundryman if he kept on making hash of my pet shirts.