“There,” he cried, jumping up from his chair. “You have called me ‘my dear’!”
Quickly she retorted: “I didn’t. At least, I didn’t mean to. You caught me up in your patient way. I was going to call you my dear something—my dear sir—my dear man——”
“My name happens to be John,” said Baltazar.
“ ‘My dear John’? No. I wasn’t going to say that.”
“Why?”
“It sounds as if we had been married for twenty years.”
With feminine instinct she had put her foot on his man’s vanity and had used it, like a rock climber, as a projection to mount to safety. She saw him uncertain, unhumorous, and felt pleasurably conscious of advantage gained.
“You said it twenty years ago, at any rate.”
She sat up victoriously in her chair. “I didn’t. Never. I don’t think I had the courage to call you anything. Certainly not John. I never even thought of you as John. As a label you were John Baltazar. But not John—tout court—like that. Oh no!”
“I suppose you’re right,” said Baltazar. “It’s a damned name. It’s everything that’s dull and prosaic in the English genius concentrated into one uninspiring vocable. Unlike other idiot names, it has no pleasing diminutive. ‘Johnnie’ is insulting. ‘Jack’ is Adelphi melodrama. Thank God I’ve been spared both. Now I burst upon you, after twenty years, as ‘John,’ and you naturally receive the idea with derision.”