"I shall never call you Arthur. Never," she told him hotly. "I loathe the name. Always have. It sounds so deadly respectable."
"You don't care for respectability?" His tone was so affable.
Ikey considered. "It may have advantages, in some cases. But——"
"Then what am I to be called?"
She might have retorted that she should call him nothing at all: he never addressed her by any name. Instead, she answered, "Boobles."
"Boobles?"
"Boobles," she repeated firmly. And then came laughter. Ikey's rages had a way of breaking up in inconvenient bursts of hilarity these days.
But what difference did that make now? What difference did anything make?
"I don't see," Ikey said to herself desperately, "what makes me so stupid. I'm afflicted with chronic mental nearsightedness. Most distressing. This is really a tragedy I'm mixed up in—a tragedy. And tragedy's a thing I never cared for."
She collapsed miserably on a bench and stared at the letter.